Spring 2010 Volume 24 - No. 1

Transcription

2 BC BOOKWORLD SPRING 2010
people
THERE MUST BE TROUT IN
TROUT LAKE
Rumpled, clever and a tad manipulative, veteran reporter
Mike McCardell is to TV journalism what Peter Falk is
to detectives. You gotta love the guy, even if it’s a schtick.
I
n his preceding 2008 collection of vignettes, Getting To The Bubble,
McCardell described meeting an autistic, runny-nosed, nine-year-old
named Reilly who is certain he will catch a fish in the polluted Vancouver
pond named Trout Lake by using a stick, a piece of string, a paper clip for
a hook and some gummy bread for bait. “I believe you get whatever you
want,” Reilly told McCardell.
Impressed by the boy’s unshakable faith in the prospect of good fortune,
McCardell has extrapolated from Reilly’s hopeful approach for another beguiling
collection of human interest stories, The Expanded Reilly Method (Harbour
$34.95), another typical McCardell bestseller.
Only this time McCardell seems to be taking feeling good, well, seriously. With
his trademark ‘aw shucks’ style, he espouses the following Dr. Phil-like advice by
using the autistic boy named Reilly as a touchstone for sanity:
Mike McCardell
topped the
BC Bestseller
List with The
Expanded
Reilly Method
NICK DIDLICK PHOTO
“We got offers of fancy fishing equipment that we passed on to his foster mother
by phone. But the reply was, ‘No, thank you.’ Reilly said he would rather fish his
own way.
“I go to Trout Lake often and look at the water and watch the dogs swimming
at one end and kids at the other. It is the smallest beach in the city. It has only a
few spots where you can walk out on a wooden pier and put a line in the water.
“I’ve seen other kids fishing and a few old timers. You can only fish there if you
are very young or very old. I never saw Reilly again.
“Maybe I missed him. Or maybe he moved on to another pond and another
foster home.
“But did he catch a fish? He said he would. He said he believed he would.
“He had other things to overcome, like no hook or float to tell him he had a
nibble, or bait except for bread. He also had to overcome strange things that go
on in the minds of autistic kids, like not being sure about things that most of us
don’t even think about, and the temper that flared up without warning that his
foster mother told us about.
“He also had that darn runny nose, and it is hard to concentrate on fishing
when you are sniffing back nasal drippings.
“I have only one thing on which to base my faith in Reilly’s method: me.
“Since I started getting up in the morning and saying, ‘This is going to be a
good day,’ I have not had a bad day. Not one.”
978-1-55017-500-4
COMINGS & GOINGS
CATHY LEGATE, DAUGHTER OF BILL DUTHIE, HAS CLOSED THE
Ray Viaud of
Peoples Co-op Books
Cathy Legate of
Duthie Books
BC
BOOKWORLD
Peoples Co-op bookstore in Vancouver has
marked 65 years in business.
✍
P.K. PAGE, ONE OF THE GRANDE DAMES OF CANADIAN
letters, born in England in 1916, died at her
Oak Bay home on January 14. The awardwinning poet, novelist, children’s
P.K. Page
writer and painter was 93.
Typographer, designer and illustrator Jim
Rimmer was an inspirational figure within
the Alcuin Society dedicated to the
appreciation of letterpress printing. He died
on January 8 after a battle with throat cancer.
Goh Poh Seng, a pioneer of Singapore
Kolin Lymworth of
literature in English, published several
Banyen Books
TWIGG PHOTO
TWIGG PHOTO
TWIGG PHOTO
last remaining Duthie Books outlet on West 4th Avenue
in Vancouver, ending 52 years of continuous
bookselling. Meanwhile Bolen Books in Victoria has
reached the 35-year mark; Banyen Books in Vancouver
is turning 40; Munro’s in Victoria is turning 47; and
SPRING
2010
Publication Mail Agreement #40010086
Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: BC BookWorld,
3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3
Issue,
Vol. 24, No. 1
Produced with the sponsorship of Pacific BookWorld News
Society. Publications Mail Registration No. 7800.
BC BookWorld ISSN: 1701-5405
Publisher/ Writer: Alan Twigg
Editor/Production: David Lester
Advertising & editorial: BC BookWorld, 3516 W. 13th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C., V6R 2S3. Tel/Fax: 604-736-4011
Email: bookworld@telus.net. Annual subscription: $25
Goh Poh Seng
Jim Rimmer
literary works from B.C. after he immigrated to Canada
in 1986. He retired from practicing medicine in 1995
and died in Vancouver on January 10. Also recently
deceased: academic Patricia Marchak (p. 36),
First Nations playwright Vera Manuel (p. 36) and
fishing expert Charlie White. For further information
on these authors, visit www.abcbookworld.com
Contributors: Grant Shilling, Mark Forsythe, Joan Givner,
Louise Donnelly, Sheila Munro, Hannah Main-van der Kamp,
John Moore, Cherie Thiessen, Shane McCune, Joseph Farris,
W.P. Kinsella. Writing not otherwise credited is by staff.
Web consultant: Sharon Jackson
Photographers: Barry Peterson, Laura Sawchuk.
Proofreaders: Wendy Atkinson, Betty Twigg.
Design: Get-to-the-Point Graphics. Deliveries: Ken Reid
For this issue,
All BC BookWorld reviews are posted online at
www.abcbookworld.com
In-Kind Supporters:
Simon Fraser University Library; Vancouver Public Library.
we gratefully acknowledge the
unobtrusive assistance of
Canada Council, a continuous
partner since 1988.
Spring Releases from New Society Publishers
C A N A D A’ S L E A D I N G P U B L I S H E R O F B O O K S O N S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y
SUSTAINABLE WORLD
SOURCEBOOK
WIND POWER BASICS
PEAK EVERYTHING
A Green Energy Guide
Critical Issues, Viable Solutions,
Resources for Action
Dan Chiras
Waking Up to the Century
of Declines
Now in Paperback
US/Can $11.95
US/Can $12.95
Mother Earth News Wiser Living Pick
“The SourceBook tells us everything we need
to know to create a healthier, more just and
more peaceful world.”
— Marianne Williamson, best-selling author,
The Age of Miracles
“When you need practical advice from a warm,
smart and informed human being, Dan Chiras
is the one to turn to.”
— Bruce King, PE, Director, Ecological Building
Network
SERIOUS MICROHYDRO
SOLAR ELECTRICITY BASICS
Water Power Solutions from
the Experts
Scott Davis
US/Can $29.95
From water to wire — harnessing the
energy of running water
“Richard Heinberg has the courage to
directly face our predicament and the
honesty to clearly yet gently describe our
alternatives.”
— Derrick Jensen, author, Endgame
Dan Chiras
US/Can $12.95
Mother Earth News Wiser Living Pick
Growing Fruits and
Vegetables in Pots
“Dan Chiras is one of the most authoritative
writers in the field of renewable energy.”
— David Johnston, author, Green Remodeling
Bob Swann's Work for Peace
and Community Economics
DRY RUN
Stephanie Mills
Preventing the Next Urban
Water Crisis
“One of the great heroes of the 20th century
decentralist movement, Bob Swann here gets
the careful, serious, and may I say loving,
treatment he deserves.”
— Kirkpatrick Sale, co-founder,
E.F. Schumacher Society
US/Can $16.95
FROM CONTAINER TO
KITCHEN
A Green Energy Guide
ON GANDHI'S PATH
US/Can $16.95
Richard Heinberg
Jerry Yudelson
US/Can $19.95
When the rivers run dry — water
solutions for a thirsty planet
D.J. Herda
US/Can $19.95
“…an invaluable guide filled with fun facts
and useful tips.”
— Don Bacue, former executive editor,
International Features Syndicate
ENERGY-WISE
LANDSCAPE DESIGN
A New Approach for
your Home and Garden
Sue Reed
US/Can $29.95
“Sue Reed’s step-by-step suggestions make
change towards sustainable landscaping
doable.”
— Leslie Jones Sauer, author, The Once
and Future Forest
THRIVING BEYOND
SUSTAINABILITY
Pathways to a Resilient Society
Andres R. Edwards
US/Can $17.95
“…thoroughly researched, deeply
contemplated, and yet eminently practical.”
— Fritjof Capra, author, The Web of Life
Call 800-567-6772 for a free catalogue or visit us at www.newsociety.com
people
YOU ARE WHAT
YOU DON’T EAT
Sarah Kramer’s How It All Vegan! is now the bestselling title
from Arsenal Pulp Press, eclipsing the First Nation’s memoir
Stoney Creek Woman (1989) by Mary John. She credits her
savvy as an entrepreneur to her “’80s punk DIY work ethic.”
H
ow It All Vegan! was lovingly
kneaded, given time to rise,
and baked to perfection in an
old rickety pink-painted
house on McClure Street in
Victoria, recently demolished.
It was one of those amazing
vintage homes that gets passed around from friend to
friend. The rent was insanely cheap—$325 for a onebedroom/den with a claw-foot tub and all the charm
you can muster in a turn-of-the-century house—but
there was a reason for all the charm, and it came in the
form of slumlord who didn’t care about the property.
Living in a slumlord’s house has pros and cons. The
benefits are the cheap rent and being able to decorate
and paint the walls any color you want. With rent that
cheap, my husband and I learned to tolerate the family
of raccoons in the attic, the broken windows, dripping
taps, and the scary knob-and-tube wiring in the attic.
This was during the height of the ’90s zine scene;
my friends and I had been making zines for years, so
neither Tanya nor I expected that our little homemade
zine would turn into an international best-selling book.
I put the book together using a crude desktop
publishing program that came with my computer, and then we photocopied all the pages
at the local copy store and collated and
bound the book in my living room. I
think our first run of the zine was maybe
100 copies.
When we handed out the book
as Xmas presents, the response
from our friends and families was
overwhelmingly positive. They
loved the book so much that
we decided to make another
900 copies to try and sell at
punk rock shows and on the
Internet. The second run of
the HIAV zine sold out almost right away and became so popular with our
peers that a light bulb
went off, and I realized
we were on to something.
Tanya and I decided to try
and go legit and find a publisher.
We started doing research
on different Canadian publishers, and Arsenal Pulp Press was our first choice
because they were local and seemed to have a similar sensibility to us. I wrote a cheeky book proposal (and included some Tofu Jerky for them to
try), but to hedge our bets we sent our proposal
to five other publishers, just in case. Three days
later, we got the call from Brian Lam of
Arsenal Pulp asking if we’d like to have a book
deal to publish How It All Vegan!
I’ll never forget talking with Brian and
K I T C H E N KO O L
DESIGNED TO MAKE THE TRANSITION TO
animal-free eating easier for newbies, Sarah
Kramer and Tanya Banyard’s How it all Vegan! (Arsenal Pulp $24.95)—re-issued with a tenth
anniversary Go Vegan calendar—is tongue-incheek, quirky and smartly packaged.
The book and calendar benefit from high-quality photos taken by Kramer’s husband, Gerry
Kramer, with whom she operates Tattoo Zoo in
Victoria.
Beneath the flippancy, there’s a serious side.
Kramer was once diagnosed with chronic fatigue
syndrome, having weighed 83 pounds. “Why am I
vegan?” she says. “How can I not be? I can’t love
one animal and eat another. I could barely eat at
all. It was an ordeal just to pick up a fork.” She
says she became friends with food again thanks
to vegan recipes.
Kramer’s zest-laden books about vegan cookery arose after editor Tanya Banyard encouraged
her to make a cookbook in 1996 as a homemade
gift project for Christmas.
Combined sales of her four titles after one decade have reportedly reached one-quarter million.
On the tenth anniversary of How It All Vegan’s
publication, Sarah Kramer has provided an account [at left] of how her first vegan cookery and
lifestyle title came into print.
978-1-55152-253-1
“I didn’t want to be like a cheesy,
mainstream Martha Stewart.”
GERRY KRAMER PHOTO
trying my best to sound normal and professional—all the while
my knees were knocking uncontrollably as I tried not
to pass out from excitement. I put down the
phone and stared at Gerry in utter
shock.
The original HIAV! zine was only
fifty pages long, so Tanya and I
furiously went to work inventing, testing, and adding more
recipes as well as adding an
introduction that included
our story about how we became vegan. We also included information for
vegan newbies making
the transition, and what
we ended up with was
a final book length
manuscript.
My kitchen at the
house on McClure
was
incredibly
small, and there
was almost no
counter space, but
I made the best of
it and used my
thrift-store kitchen
table as a place to write,
bake, chop, test, and retest every single recipe for
HIAV!. Gerry and I didn’t have a
lot of money back then, and I was working with the bare minimum of supplies:
a few knives, a food processor (that was
a wedding gift), and barely enough
money to buy all the food to recipe test.
Gerry worked two jobs (in a restaurant
and as a tattoo artist) so I could focus
on the book.
continued on page 6
people
continued from page 5
GERRY KRAMER PHOTO
ing on the cover was the best thing we
Out of our financial limitations the
could have done. I have countless fan
mantra for the book was born: Healthy,
mail from people telling me that they
purchased the book without even lookdelicious recipes that were easy to make,
with easy–to-find ingredients.
ing inside because they saw us on the
Our vision was for it to be not just a
cover and were excited to see someone
cookbook but more about how to live a
like themselves reflected back.
fun and happy life as
I also have a few
a vegan. We wanted
letters from mothers
who ripped off the
readers to discover
that being vegan was
cover, or covered
easy once you knew
the book with paper
a few tips and tricks.
so we wouldn’t inWe spent many
fluence their kids
months recipe testwith our tattoos and
ing, editing, and repiercings.
editing the book.
We did every inWe poured our
terview request. We
hearts and souls into
worked hard to get
every page.
the word out, and it
I was at Tanya’s
showed in sales. I
house the day we got
thought we’d be
to see the book back
lucky if we sold a few
from the printers.
thousand copies,
We eagerly ripped
but when the numopen the envelope,
bers came back at
30,000 books sold
and I stared at the
cover in disbelief.
“Then I flipped to the in our first few
Holy shit. We were
months of sales, I
back of the book
was in shock.
authors. I thought,
and my heart sank.
“Wow. This is going
I really thought
to end up in a liwe had hit the big
There was no index.
time. Best-selling
brary somewhere.” I
“Where’s the inwas
incredibly
book. Fame. So
dex?” I yelled at
proud of the work
where’s the fortune?
Tanya. We had both
I quickly learned
we did.
Then I flipped to
that writing a cookassumed that the
is not a way to
the back of the book
publishers would put book
and my heart sank.
make quick money.
the index in.”
There was no index.
The book sells.
“Where’s the index?”
Money goes to the
I yelled at Tanya. We had both assumed
store. The store pays the distributor, who
that the publishers would put the index
then pays the publisher, who then splits
the royalty portion with each author.
in. I called Brian in a panic, and he said,
“Does a cookbook need an index?”
It was then that I realized this project
was going to be more of a labour of love
Oh my lord.
So the first 2,000 copies of HIAV! hit
than a job. A job pays you a regular
the shelves without an index. For all of
paycheque. You get medical and dental.
You work 9–5. This new job of being a
you who have that first edition, you can
take it up with Brian.
cookbook author was 24/7, and if I
added up the hours I worked versus the
✍
cash I was bringing in—I was being paid
I got busy myself, promoting the
pennies.
book via the Internet. The ’net was a
But it didn’t matter to me because we
fairly new concept back then (can you
were receiving so much encouraging fan
even remember what life was like before
mail from the readers; they were loving
the Internet?), and for the first time I
what we were doing, and it was hard to
was able to easily communicate with
think about walking away to get a real
other vegans, not just in my local comjob. I really felt that what we were domunity but around the world.
ing was beneficial for the vegan commuI wrote back to each and every pernity, and on a personal level I found the
son who wrote to GoVegan.net (and I still
work utterly satisfying, creatively.
do). Ten years later, it still blows my mind
Gerry had started tattooing full-time,
to think that someone as far away as
Greece has my book in their kitchen. I’ve
and we were able to live off the money
actually become very good friends with
he made from that so I could continue
some of the people who wrote fan mail.
with the books. Thank Tofu for Gerry
I think without the Internet HIAV!
and his support or none of this would
would have been just another cookbook
have been possible. With a little extra
on the shelves, but people our age were
cash in our pockets, we were anxious to
logging onto the web and finding other
get out of the McClure Street house, as
like-minded people to talk to about aniit was starting to fall apart, and we were
mal rights, vegan products, politics, and
afraid for our safety. Two months after
everything in-between. Word of mouth
we moved out, the ceiling in the living
spreads fast on the Internet, and they
room collapsed, so we’d been lucky to
found us at GoVegan.net.
move out when we did.
Our publisher, Brian, insisted that we
But even though that house was
be on the cover, and I fought him for a
creaky, drafty and mouse-infested, my
while because I didn’t want to be like a
life changed in a way I never expected
cheesy, mainstream Martha Stewart
while I lived there, so that old rickety
(sorry Martha, I do love you). Thank
pink house holds a special place in my
Tofu he won that argument, because beheart, and I’m sad that it’s now gone.
spring reading
from Sono Nis Press
The Littlest Monkey
Plants of Haida Gwaii
Sarah E. Turner
Nancy J. Turner
“Tombo sees a tiny
face snuggled up to his
mother! The new baby
monkey opens her
eyes and looks at him
just before his mother
pushes him gently but
firmly away.”
A detailed and insightful
record of the uses and
importance to the Haida
of over 150 species of
native plants. Moreover, it
explains the knowledge and
understanding that enabled
the Haida to use the resources
of their islands sustainable
from one generation to the
next for thousands of years.
Richly illustrated with colour
and black and white photos
and illustrations.
Primatologist Sarah
Turner’s compelling
photographs and
simple text illuminates every page as she shares this universal tale about growing up,
moving over, and finding our way in the world.
N
KI
C
BA
INT
PR
ISBN 1-55039-176-3 • 7.5” x 9.25” • 264 pages • paper • $38.95 • April
1-55039-174-7 • 9” x 7.5” • 32 pages • paper • $9.95 • April
Mountain Timber
Logging by Rail
The Comox Logging Company in the
Vancouver Island Mountains
Robert D. Turner
IN
CK
A
B
INT
PR
An insightful history and a
sweeping portrait of railroad
logging in British Columbia. The
book begins with the small rail
logging operations of the 1880s
and continues through the height
of the steam era, two world wars,
the Depression, the change to
truck logging and the last steam
and dieselized logging lines.
Canadian Railroad Historical
Association Book Award.
ISBN 1-55039-065-1 • 8.5” x 11”
348 pages • paper • $39.95 • April
Richard Somerset Mackie
BC Bestseller
In this sequel to his best-selling
Island Timber, Richard Somerset
Mackie follows the Comox Logging
Company from 1926 to 1946 as it
moves from the logged-over Comox
Valley to the challenging terrain of
the Vancouver Island Mountains. A
stunning visual feast, this is social
history and logging history at its
best.
ISBN 1-55039-171-2 • 8.5 x 11
320 pages • paper • $42.95
BC Bestseller
Flights of a Coast Dog
Coast Dogs Don’t Lie
Counting on Hope
A Pilot’s Log
Tales from the North Coast Sched
Sylvia Olsen
Jack Schofield
Jack Schofield
Back in Print! Flights of a Coast Dog tells
of Jack Schofield’s adventures from 20
years of flying Beavers, Otters and Cessna
floatplanes along British Columbia’s
rugged and challenging coast.
Packed with colourful anecdotes and even
more colourful characters, Coast Dogs
Don’t Lie brings the early days of flying the
B.C. coast back to life.
Set against the backdrop of the English
colonization of British Columbia, and an 1863
naval assault on a Lamalcha camp on Kuper
Island, Counting on Hope tells the story of
two girls whose lives are profoundly changed
when their two cultures collide.
ISBN 1-55039-172-0 • 8.5” x 8.5”
196 pages • hardcover • $29.95
ISBN 1-55039-169-0 • 8.25” x 8.25”
144 pages • hardcover • $29.95
ISBN 1-55039-173-9 • 6 x 9
304 pages • paper • $14.95
Celebrating 42 Years of Publishing in Canada
Sono Nis Press • 1-800-370-5228 • www.sononis.com • books@sononis.com
Veterans with a Vision
Beautifully realized, this is an unbelievable fifty-year
journey documenting a critical part of queer Canadian
history. Not only is it impeccably researched but it’s told
through the voices of our community.
Canada’s War Blinded in
Peace and War
SERGE MARC DURFLINGER
– Janine Fuller, manager of Little Sister’s Bookstore
and co-author of Restricted Entry: Censorship on Trial
A vibrant, poignant, and very human
history of war-blinded veterans and of the
advocacy organization they founded, the
Sir Arthur Pearson Association of War
Blinded.
The Canadian War on Queers
National Security as Sexual Regulation
GARY KINSMAN AND PATRIZIA GENTILE
For nearly fifty years, from the 1950s to
as recently as the late 1990s, agents of
the Canadian state spied on, interrogated,
and harassed gays and lesbians in a series
of so-called national security campaigns.
The Canadian War on Queers traces this
history, revealing acts of state repression
and forms of social resistance that raise
questions about just whose security was
being protected.
NEW IN PAPERBACK
March 2010, 464 pages, 6.6 x 9.5"
54 b&w photos
978-0-7748-1856-8 $29.95
printed in large type
I was unlucky enough to get in the way of one of the shrapnel
bullets. I felt a slight sting in my right temple as though pricked
by a red-hot needle – and then the world became black.
Dawn was now breaking, but night had sealed my eyes.
– James Rawlinson, blinded at Vimy, 1917
NEW IN PAPERBACK
March 2010, 584 pages, 6 x 9"
19 b&w photos, 1 map
978-0-7748-1628-1 $34.95
Books written about the conflict record major political decisions
and their results; they speak of generals, and of heroes. There is a
paucity of literary tribute to those who offered their youth to war;
nor are there books which tell of the disabled, the war blinded,
the amputee, the burnt-out veteran.
– David Dorward, blinded in Sicily, 1943
Compelling personal stories illuminate this impeccably researched
analysis of the use of national security legislation to wage a war
against lesbian and gay Canadians during the Cold War years.
– Lynne Fernie, filmmaker, co-director of
Forbidden Love and Fiction and Other Truths
Published in association with the Canadian War Museum
and the Sir Arthur Pearson Association of War Blinded
Available from fine bookstores near you
or order online @ www.ubcpress.ca
War. Resilience. History.
New and exciting work from Ekstasis Editions…
E K S TA S I S E D I T I O N S W W W. E K S TA S I S E D I T I O N S . C O M
Scarecrow
India, India
Muscle Memory
DUNCAN REGEHR
YOLANDE VILLEMAIRE
LINDA ROGERS
ISBN ----
Poetry & Art  pages
.
TRANSLATED
BY LEONARD
ISBN ----
Poetry  Pages
.
SUGDEN
ISBN ----
Fiction  pages
.
The Jagged Years
of Ruthie J.
RUTH SIMKIN
ISBN ----
Memoir  Pages
.
The Watchmans
Dance
Eyes & Ears on
Boundary Bay
What It Means
to Be Human
Three Blocks West
of Wonderland
MIKE DOYLE
DAVID WATMOUGH
D.C. REID
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
HEATHER
SUSAN HALEY
S PLIT
Island in the Light
STEPHEN BETT
RICHARD OLAFSON
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
Winnipeg from
the Fringes
Woman Walking
WALTER HILDEBRANDT
ELIZABETH RHETT
WOODS
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY RON A. DREWNIAK
ISBN ----
Poetry  Pages
.
Misshapenness
The Catch Club
J.J. STEINFELD
JOHN O. THOMPSON
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
ISBN ----
Poetry  Pages
.
ISBN ----
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Selected Poems
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
The Language
of Water
Nuances
GENINE HANNS
ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
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ISBN ----
Poetry  pages
.
MANOLIS
E K S TA S I S E D I T I O N S B O X 8 4 7 4 , M A I N P O S TA L O U T L E T V I C T O R I A , B . C .
V8W 3S1
THE WAY WE WERE
SHADES
OF JANE
Vanessa Winn
consulted letters and
journals to write about
matrimonial intrigues
within the family of
John Work.
Vanessa Winn’s debut
novel explores pride and
prejudice in Victoria,
1858-1861
T
The Fraser Gold Rush breathed the
air of possibility into the village of
Victoria, and while the men prospected for gold and speculated on
land, the women speculated on prospects of another kind.
LAURA SAWCHUK PHOTO
he elegant declarative sentence with which Vanessa
Winn begins her first novel
about pre-colonial British
Columbia, The Chief Factor’s Daughter (Touchwood
$19.95), recalls the familiar
opening of a novel by Jane Austen:
donate the fashionable hoops that have
vour of the times—the muddy roads, the
suspects that it is not admiration so much
As with Austen’s unmarried heroine
arrived on a recent boat to poor girls
encampments of natives and gold-seekas a curiosity about her mixed racial back
Elizabeth Bennett in Pride & Prejudice,
who
have
none,
their
own
dresses
hang
ers, the rivalries between the first famiground
that
makes
him
stare
at
her
foreWinn’s heroine Margaret Work
down
awkwardly.
Lieutenant
Wilson
lies, the modes of transportation, and the
head.
numbers among her sisters one close
concludes
that
the
“half-breeds”
are
igHer suspicions are confirmed later
social events. With its graceful style and
confidante near to herself in age, and
norant of current fashion and incapaappealing characters, it provides a great
when she overhears him wondering
one tiresome, flirtatious, younger one.
ble of dressing elegantly. Yet with
introduction to an historical study of
aloud if the daughters of Governor
Historical figures and events are
familiarity, his prejudice evaporates. He
British Columbia for readers of all ages,
Douglas have had their heads flatpresent—the Pig War on San Juan Isis awed by Margaret’s riding skills, much
and should be a popular addition to
tened. The governor’s wife was in fact
land, the conflicts in the church (the
superior to his own, and he relishes the
every school library.
half Cree and Margaret’s mother was rebitter rivalry between Bishop Hills
lavish
hospitality
of
Hillside
and
becomes
ferred
to
as
having
‘Spokane’
Winn prefaces each of her thirty
and Reverend Edward
a
regular
guest.
chapters
with a paragraph from a hisblood.
But
Margaret
is
shocked
Cridge), and the influx of
Margaret’s
marital
prospects
are
not
torical
document—a
diary or a letter—
to hear Lieutenant Wilson regold miners from Califoreasily resolved. The officers’ furloughs,
and shapes the subsequent chapter as a
fer to the local women as halfnia—but these form a backpostings to distant parts of the province,
fictional gloss on the extract. In it, she
breeds and as “les belles
drop to the matrimonial
and returns to England are not condufleshes out the characters of those mensauvages.” Her immediate reacprospects of three daughters
cive to stable relationships. Moreover, a
tion is that she would rather be
tioned and dramatizes the exchanges
of marriageable age among
wife
of
mixed
race
from
the
colonies
is
a
between them. Thus she deftly weaves
considered
ugly
and
civilized
the five still at home.
JOAN GIVNER
liability
for
those
returning
permanently
together history and fiction to form an
than
beautiful
and
savage.
Then
It amounts to a well-reto
England.
The
Work
sister
who
goes
informative and engrossing story. An
she
realizes
that
a
rival
local
family
with
searched story that traces a pattern of
to
England
writes
of
feeling
alien
and
epilogue gives an account of the subsemarriageable daughters (probably the
pride and prejudice. Some of the prejuhomesick. Nor is Margaret herself willquent fortunes—births, deaths, tragLangfords) has tried to turn Lieutenant
dice is that of Lieutenant Charles
ing to settle for a supercilious EnglishWilson against her with rumours of
edies—of the Work family and the
Wilson, a supercilious British officer
man or a boring widower in search of a
division of the Hillside property.
Flathead blood.
of the Royal Engineers who is one of
978-1894898935
mother for his brood.
There is vast scope for misunderstandseven Boundary Commission officers
With its wealth of domestic details,
Joan Givner writes regularly from
ing between the officers and the colowho arrived at the Colony of Vancouthe
book
conveys
a
vivid
sense
of
the
flaMill Bay, north of Victoria.
nists.
When
the
Work
girls
generously
ver Island to map the shifting boundaries between British and American
territories.
Winn’s account covers two momentous years at the end of the sixth decade
of the nineteenth century, and their efnyone familiar with Victoria’s streets will
1852), Work later moved to a farm in Hillside,
recognize names of characters in
fect on the life of the oldest unmarried
now part of Victoria, and served on the
Vanessa W inn’s The Chief Factor ’s
Legislative Council of Vancouver Island.
Work daughter, Margaret. At the adDaughter—such
as
Douglas,
Dallas,
Remarkable for his endurance, Work
vanced age of 24 she is in danger of beBegbie, Helmcken, Tolmie, Finlayson.
survived
a near-fatal attack by a bull, contracted
coming a spinster which held the risk of
and Wark, although it is unclear whether Wark
malaria, had recurring eye troubles, inflamed
poverty as well as the humiliation of enStreet was actually named after John Work.
tonsils (“quinsy”) and a near-fatal fall from a tree
tering drawing rooms behind younger
Born as John Wark near Derry, Ireland in
that tore open his stomach and spilled some of
sisters whose married status gives them
1792, he joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in
his intestines. Work put his guts back into place
precedence over her.
1814 and reached the Pacific Northwest in 1823.
and overcame the injury.
He explored the lower Fraser River in 1824 as a
Work remained on the Board of Management
Lieutenant Wilson eagerly claims the
clerk for James McMillan, keeping the John Work, father of Vanessa for the HBC at Fort Victoria, co-signing an
allotted three dances (the number is raexpedition’s journal, then oversaw construction Winn’s heroine, bought 583 important letter dated November 24, 1858, that
tioned) on Margaret’s card at a ball on
of Fort Colville where he served as a clerk acres north of Fort Victoria in first listed the HBC’s land claims in B.C.
board H.M.S. Plumper, moored in
(1826–1830).
True to his name, John Work was a stalwart
1852. He later became
Esquimalt harbour. While her sisters obHaving managed the HBC’s most northerly Vancouver Island’s largest employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company until
serve with envy his intent gaze at
post in New Caledonia, at Fort Simpson (1835– landowner.
the day he died in December of 1861.
Margaret’s face during the dances, she
TRUE TO HIS NAME
A
THE WAY WE WERE
SHAKIN’
ALL
OVER
An academic lays bare
the facts of showgirls
A
s UBC sociology professor Becki
L. Ross will be the first to tell
you, the storied Penthouse night
club at 1019 Seymour Street
merits a book of its own.
Opened by the four Filippone brothers in 1950, the Penthouse used to attract up to 600 patrons per night as a
‘bottle club’ (BYOB) to see the likes of
Tony Bennett, Sophie Tucker,
Sammy Davis Jr., Liberace,
Har r y Belafonte and Ella
Fitzgerald.
Ross Filippone was general
manager; Mickey ran the bar (natch),
Jimmy was the maintenance man, lifelong bachelor Joe was the flashy front
man and sister Florence was the
bookkeeper. The Filippones were discriminated against as Italians, for hiring
black entertainers and for providing a
safe haven for more than 100 prostitutes
on any given night.
The city’s “oldest stationary funhouse”
started as one of precious few places in
staid downtown Vancouver where one
could get a decent steak. Police raided
the place frequently, but patrons were
given hiding places for their booze and
Miss Lovie at
Club New
Delhi as
advertised in
The Vancouver
Sun, 1969
there was usually a watchman on the roof
to sound the alarm. The Filippones made
ten failed applications for a legit liquor
license before they succeeded in 1968.
Ten years later, Sun columnist Denny
Boyd reflected, “It was the place to go
after hours to get a steak, mixer for your
bottle, see a show, run into a friend or
find a hooker. Make no mistake about it,
hookers came to The Penthouse. So did
other club owners, musicians, lawyers,
safecrackers, corporation presidents, Hollywood starlets, cheating husbands, stockbrokers, school principals, gamblers,
plainclothes RCMP surveillance team,
PTA presidents, surgeons, drug-users,
short-order cooks and—I suspect—the
odd man of the cloth.”
✍
Becki L. Ross’s Burlesque West:
Showgirls, Sex and Sin in Postwar Vancouver (University of Toronto Press,
$29.95) necessarily chronicles the colourful Penthouse but her scope is much
more ambitious and informative than
mere nostalgia or rear-view voyeurism.
Glitzier, westside hangouts like Isy’s
and The Cave were not allowed to overshadow the eastside clubs such as the
New Delhi Cabaret and the Harlem
Nocturne run by Choo Choo
Williams and Ernie King.
We learn that as early as 1945, headliner Yvette Dare at the Beacon
Theatre had a trained parrot named Jeta
that helped her disrobe on stage. Her
show was billed as a Balinese dance to
the bird god.
Cumulatively, Burlesque West is a superbly researched chronicle of how Vancouver, a city with some of North
America’s most stringent and puritanical liquor laws for decades, became one
of the hotspots for stripping in the
1970s and 1980s.
For the record, the Club Zanzibar
(formerly Torch Cabaret), the Factory
and Café Kobenhavn introduced socalled ‘bottomless’ dancing in the fall of
1971. Eventually even Isy’s nightclub on
Georgia Street would become Isy’s Strip
City.
Burlesque West is a rare academic
work, ground-breaking, accessible, lucid and completely serious. The fact that
its author generated a minor stir when
she received a major research grant to
undertake the study merely proves the
need for a frank and public examination of burlesque and its offshoots in the
first place.
✍
G-strings came off with the election
of the NDP in 1972. The musical Hair
UBC professor Becki L. Ross,
author of Burlesque West
had played in Toronto, with full nudity,
and no charges had been laid. Hey, if
Toronto could handle it….
Café Kobenhavn at 968 Main Street
was run by the Satan’s Angels biker
gang. By 1972, when dancers and staff
were charged with presenting an obscene performance, The Province entertainment reporter Michael Walsh
testified on the club’s behalf by noting
he had counted 29 females and 111
males sunbathing nude at Wreck Beach.
The genie, or Jeannie, was out of the
bottle.
So-called peeler clubs mushroomed.
By 1975, there were thirty locales featuring full nudity in Vancouver, as well
as countless venues in the Lower Mainland, such as: No. 5 Orange, Austin,
American, St. Helen’s, Royal, Niagara,
St. Regis, Drake, Marr, Nelson Place,
Balmoral, Castle, New Fountain, Fraser
Arms, Marble Arch, Piccadilly, Yale,
Cobalt, Dufferin, Vanport, Barn, Cecil
and The Factory.
Just as television had threatened the
demise of The Penthouse in the fifties
and sixties, back when folks could stay
at home and watch Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis on The Ed Sullivan
Show for free, exotic dancers in beer
parlours for the price of a beer made for
even stiffer competition than tv.
Ross Filipponi told Becki Ross: “The
hotels started to bring up top-line girls.
They were giving the public what they
wanted. No cover charge.” The Penthouse and other nightclubs had a cover
charge and could only stay open from 7
pm to 2 am, whereas a beer parlour in a
hotel could have dancers from noon to
2 am.
As St. Regis Hotel manager Larry
Thiesson told The Province, “hotels
continued on page 13
THE WAY WE WERE
continued from page 11
aren’t churches.” And so it was that
Vancouver—somewhat bizarrely—suddenly became one of the best places in
North America to find bump & grind.
Ross’ academic approach, tinged
with feminism, does not overlook the
fascinating range of characters, such as
notorious entrepreneur Gar y
Taylor, now in his late 60s. Taylor
started his career as a teenage drummer backing dancers at clubs like the
Smilin’ Buddha, and at the PNE’s girlie
shows.
“It was rumoured that Taylor was a
smooth, fast-talking operator who bet
strangers on the
street that he
could get a
woman to take
her clothes off on
his stage,” Ross
writes. “A longtime
friend
Gary Taylor, 1977
joked that Taylor
could talk a nun into going on stage.”
Most of the larger-than-life club
owners such as Ernie King, Ross
Filliponi and Richard Walters
(living in California) reached old age.
Isy Walters died in his club of a
heart attack. Joe Filipone died in his
club with a bullet in his head.
✍
Somewhat nostalgic for the olden
days, and always admiring of the artistry and courage of the performers,
Ross’ examination of burlesque as a
business proves equally engaging. We
learn that when top-line American
dancers such as Sally Rand,
Gypsy Rose Lee, Ricki
Covette, Lili St. Cyr and
Temptest Storm performed in
Vancouver during the 1950s and
1960s, they were earning up to $5,000
per week even after they turned forty
years of age. “While most female service
workers were
paid low wages,
earning 57 per
cent of what men
earned doing
similar work,”
Ross writes, “only
a small number
Joe Filippone, 1982
of women in corporations and in the professions of law
and medicine matched the income of
‘white features’ following World War
II.”
Erotic dancing can be a profession.
It’s not perhaps the oldest profession,
but perhaps close to it.
And for a few decades, Vancouver,
like it or not, was a hip-swivelling and
gyrating Mecca for women who plied
their skin trade as dancers.
And through it all, The Penthouse
remains open at the heart of the city,
sixty years young, a bastion of burlesque. In a nutshell, Ross has combined thorough research with a
clear-eyed sensibility that looks beyond
“a puritan ideology that is at once fascinated and repulsed by female nudity
and sexuality” to prove that erotic dancers who work full-time deserve to have
their vocation respected and appreciated as work.
978-0802096463
THE CARPENTER WORE
PINK
BC
BOOKW
ORLD
PICK
STAFF
“I laugh at bad jokes. Make good money.”—KATE
J
OBS WERE SCARCE ON A GULF ISLAND IN
1977. Kate Braid, at age thirty,
was desperate to stay. At a party, someone piped up, “I just quit my job as a
carpenter on the new school. Apply for
that.”
Braid had never hung a door, never
mixed concrete, but everyone convinced
her she should apply.
There is liquid courage and there is
also liquid logic.
Just lie, they told her.
She met the crew boss. She had no
construction skills, no training, but he
hired her. Years later Kate Braid found
out why. His crew had been slacking off,
so the foreman thought having a pretty
woman on the site might increase their
motivation to look good at their work.
✍
Now Kate Braid has looked back at her
fifteen years in construction with both
nostalgia and a critical eye in Turning Left
to the Ladies (Palimpsest Press $18). It
recalls her progression from her first job
as a neophyte construction labourer on a
Gulf Island to building houses and
bridges on the Lower Mainland as an apprentice carpenter, then as a journeyman
carpenter, surrounded by men.
Eventually Braid became the first female member of the Vancouver union
local of the Carpenters and the first
woman to teach building trades full-time
at the BC Institute of Technology. Along
the way, she had a love/hate relationship
with her work, cherishing her competence and resenting her loneliness.
In this finely-wrought memoir, she
recalls how she felt intimidated, other
times privileged, other times supported.
She learns the beauty of men; and she
sees their failings. Men have posters of
naked women in the lockers. She sees
how they can treat women like hunting
trophies.
“Mine is the experience of prey, of
the fish and the deer, of being entered
into, of a space within meant for welcome.”
Turning Left to the Ladies refers to
that awkward moment after work, when
everyone is raising a pint, when she feels
she has parachuted into male territory,
when they are talking shop, and she slips
away from the raucous camaraderie and
deftly turns left, entering the women’s
washroom, “only a small slip under the
radar.”
She placed a sticker on her hard hat
that said Wild Woman but she knew she
had to be very careful. One guy liked to
drop things on her head. Another coworker wanted to protect her. One
couldn’t wait to tell his best dirty joke.
To deflect them all, she started to wear
pink. “First, little pink embroidery flowers so small you could hardly see them
on my coveralls. then a pink
mackinaw…
✍
This is mature, reflective, investigative writing that ventures far beyond
self-glorification. There is much to be
Something Lost
BY KATE BRAID
These days, construction
workers are small
hard-hatted jewels dangling
from the necklace of a crane.
Sometimes I slink past,
head down, as if ashamed.
I have lost my right to be there.
Sometimes I wave—Hi, boys!
Remember me, a sister?
They never wave back.
Or if they do,
it’s one of those waves they
give to all the girls,
a whistle, a leer.
I have lost something—the smell
of the pitch, the certainty
of nails. Those men? They were
a magnifying glass
in which I saw myself, tenfold.
BRAID
learned from men, beyond reading
blueprints and banging nails. Braid
muses on the need for more women to
write and talk overtly about their own
private parts, the way men do. “Here’s a
toast to our pink taco rose garden our
Southern belle tongue magnet wunderdown-under French pleat…” A poem
by a woman who wore size ten steel-toed
boots.
Making a spectacle of oneself can be
a political strategy and an act of courage. Although she never strategized to
be a feminist pioneer, that doesn’t lessen
her courage. When Braid endures one
job for six months, and all the men have
fully accepted her as a colleague, and she
can share their jibes and humour, she
realizes it’s the most radical thing she has
ever done.
One of the best poems is one of the
shortest. Braid describes the confusion
she lately feels on the sidewalk whenever
she passes a construction site, having left
the trades. She momentarily yearns for
the men to recognize her as a former
equal, to acknowledge that she knows
what they do, who they are. But the
schism of conventional thinking, of sexism, divides her and she feels invisible to
them. Someone from a different species.
A woman.
Braid ran her own renovation company, Sisters Construction, before turning away from hammers in favour of the
literary life. In 2006 she was Woodward
Chair at SFU where she coordinated a
research project on the number of
women in trades in B.C. “That number
is the same now as it was in 1980—less
than three per cent,” she says. “It made
me realize the importance—still—of
telling tradeswomen’s stories.”
Hence Turning Left to the Ladies. Ultimately, Braid urges other women to
follow suit, to learn to build, to add new
meaning to the word homemaker “as we
build the new world, one nail, one wall,
one woman at a time.”
97800-9784917-0-3
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Eligibility is limited to Canadian residents age 18 or older, except residents of Quebec.
THE WAY WE WERE
IN
SEARCH
OF
GRAMPS
BY DICK BOURGEOIS-DOYLE
S
eized by the drama and glory of
polar adventure, Char les
Seymour Wright was just a
lad from “the colonies,” a Canadian graduate student at Cambridge in
1910, when he marched fifty miles to
London and gained his place in the
Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole
led by Robert Falcon Scott.
Wright’s role in that epic and tragic
expedition has now been fully and affectionately acknowledged by his grandson Adrian Raeside, long-time
political cartoonist for the Victoria-Times
Colonist, in Return to Antarctica: The
Amazing Adventure of Sir Charles
Wright on Robert Scott’s Journey to the
South Pole (Wiley $34.95).
Terra Nova was the name of the Labrador-based sealing ship that was purchased from Bowrings of Newfoundland
for what would be Scott’s final journey.
The expedition is famous for Scott’s
gruesome death and that of the four others who had accompanied him to the
Pole in January 1912.
At the pole, Scott and several companions were confronted with the sight
of a flag, a tent, and other heart-breaking evidence that their Norwegian competitor Roald Amundsen had beaten
them to their goal by thirty-four days.
Scott and his compatriots railed at their
misfortune, then starved, froze, and finally expired on the trek back to the
Cape Evans base camp on the coast.
In November of that year, with
Wright acting as their “Navigator,” a
search party finally located Scott and two
of his ice-encrusted comrades. It was
Wright who spotted a tiny point poking
through the snow about a kilometre
away, veered off from the others, and
dug into the drifts to eventually locate
the frozen bodies, the tents, equipment,
and—most influentially—the dead
men’s notes.
These notes not only told the story of
Scott’s arrival at the Pole, but also confirmed Amundsen’s achievement and
conveyed the heroism and drama of the
adventure.
The drama was made more compelling by hundreds of photos taken by
professional filmmaker and photographer Herbert Ponting who produced two widely-seen films about the
MARI OGAWA PHOTO
Adrian Raeside retraces
his grandfather’s footsteps
in the Antarctic summer
of 2008-2009.
mour and opinions
seep into the narrative, but in a light,
measured way that
does nothing to detract from the
storyline. In fact,
Raeside’s style gives it
a more personal, visceral and meaningful feel.
Useful injections
of irreverence remind the reader that
polar exploration
was not entirely
fuelled by selfless
patriotism or the
quest to expand human knowledge.
According to
Raeside, the successful polar explorer
was the rock star of
the period, rewarded by “the lecture circuit, girls, a bigger ship, bigger girls.”
Raeside notes Sir John Franklin was
and is “the Elvis of Arctic explorers—
and just as dead.”
Return to Antarctica links Wright’s
adventures to his personal background,
within the fuller context of the times.
Raeside has also benefited from access
to personal records, family contacts, and
a lifetime within the atmosphere of the
Terra Nova story. Two of his great-uncles as well as his grandfather were key
players and survivors of the expedition.
For Canadians who would like to see
themselves as a people of determination
and competence with a capacity for
pleasantness despite adversity, Return to
Antarctica makes for good and inspiring reading.
It is an eminently readable and a wellreferenced primer for those unfamiliar
with the early era of great polar
adventure.
978-0-470-15380-2
Victoria
cartoonist Adrian
Raeside finds his
grandfather’s
bunk in the
preserved Terra
Nova hut, Cape
Evans, 2008.
Antarctic. The most arresting and haunting images of the expedition are perhaps
those shot from within a towering “ice
cave” featuring Charles Wright and a
portrait-style close-up of Wright’s blistered and beaten young face upon his
return from his “Southern Journey.”
As a physics student from Toronto,
Wright used his experience for essentially
founding the field of glaciology, the
multidisciplinary study of ice. Wright became Sir Charles and received many
honours prior to his death in 1975.
Evidently Wright was a hard man to
dislike. He was considered by Scott to
be “very thorough and absolutely ready
for anything.” The captain said of his
young Canadian comrade that “Nothing ever seems to worry him” and that
he could not imagine that Wright “ever
complained of anything in his life.”
In recent decades, a broader understanding of Wright’s role in the expedition has surfaced in selected magazine
articles, bolstered by the publication of
Silas, an edited version of Charles
Wright’s diaries—the title of which is the
enduring nickname he picked up on the
journey.
Charles Seymour Wright: “The most Godforsaken country this is. If I ever get clear
of it, I never want to see it again.”
Raeside outlines his grandfather’s scientific and military career in his final
chapter. As impressive as the story of
Wright’s role in the Antarctic is, his other
life as a researcher and science leader
might out-weigh it as raw material for
another kind of book.
As a student prior to his departure
for the Antarctic, Wright worked on
novel radiation technologies including
a measuring instrument that pre-dated
the patenting of the Geiger Counter.
✍
The New Zealand-born Raeside’s hu-
Dick Bourgeois-Doyle is Director
of Corporate Governance at the
National Research Council of Canada
(NRC) in Montreal.
In search of rutting musk ox, flatulent elephants and Bengal tigers
U
nder-celebrated and unassuming,
Anthony Dalton rivals the likes
of Wade Davis and Jim Delgado
as one of B.C.’s most-travelled authors.
Many of Dalton’s global escapades are
retold in Adventures with Camera and
Pen (BookLand $24.95) as he searches
for polar bears on the shores of Hudson
Bay, evades rutting musk ox, meets
flatulent elephants and tracks Royal
Bengal tigers in Bangladesh. Dalton
affably recounts his journey to the salt
mines north of Timbuktu with a CBCTV film crew, buying camels in Oman
and rescuing a Canadian from Nigeria.
He doesn’t look like Indiana Jones, but
he’s a man for all climates, from Norway
to Namibia. His new River Rough,
River Smooth (Dundurn $32.99)
retraces the path of explorers on
Manitoba’s Hayes River which runs for
more than 600 kilometres from near
Norway House to Hudson Bay.
Avid sailor & intrepid photographer Anthony Dalton has received
Camera 978-0-9784395-2-1; River 978-1-55488-712-5 the 2009 Surrey Board of Trade Special Achievement Award.
Spain walker
I
n Rooster in the
Cathedral (Shoreline
Press $26), Presbyterian
minister Paul Myers
walks the ancient
pilgrimage route that
leads to the Cathedral of
Santiago de Compostela,
Spain. Neither a travelogue nor a guidebook,
Rooster is a series of
meditations on personal
challenges and the larger,
sometimes intractable,
issues of life. Myers has
delivered over 750 public
addresses, and appeared
on numerous regional and
national
television
broadcasts.
978-1-896754-78-9
THE WAY WE WERE
T-t-t-t-t-talking ’bout a generation
L
awrence’s Aronsen’s forthcoming social history City
of Love and Revolution (New Star $24) will recall the socalled hippie era in Vancouver when psychedelia and
the illusion of free love generated an ebullient counter-culture.
As the naive ideals of Haight Ashbury spread north to whitebread Vancouver, giving rise to the Georgia Straight newspaper, music blossomed along with confrontational politics,
culminating in the birth of Greenpeace and the Gastown Riot.
Aronsen’s account is illustrated with photos, drawings, and advertisements drawn from the newspapers—both straight and
9781554200481
Georgia Straight—that chronicled the era.
Nurse-lieutenants march along Government St. in Victoria, 1915.
BACK TO THE FRONT
Not all war heroes wear boots.
Some wear skirts & boots.
Maureen Duffus’ Battlefront Nurses in W.W. I: The
Canadian Army Medical Corps In England, France and Salonika, 1914–1919 (Town and Gown $29.95) is the true story
of four years in the lives of two nursing sisters who enlisted in
the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Esquimalt, British Columbia, in the summer of 1915. Duffus has showcased the
diary of Nursing Sister Elsie Collis, a memoir by Nursing
Sister Ethel Morrison and photograph albums from
1915 to the end of their service in 1919, along with relevant
excerpts from recollections of nurses and doctors from other
Canadian medical units. Political and military situations requiring their services have been summarized to put overseas
postings into context. Both Collis and Morrison served overseas in England, Salonika and France as lieutenants with the
Canadian Army Medical Corps.
8978-0-9733809-1-0
Led Zeppelin for a ticket price of $3.
Korky Day sells The Georgia Straight
(top). Publisher Dan McLeod is
arrested on “investigation of
vagrancy,” a non-existent charge.
All images from The Georgia Straight.
THE WAY WE WERE
THE BIRTH
OF FREESTYLE
ost local histories are written by
people over age fifty—and that’s
a fine thing.
Stephen Vogler is under fifty
and his Only in Whistler: Tales of a
Mountain Town (Harbour $24.95) is
radically different.
For starters, its unusual cover literally
shows four ski bums; four women wearing only skis and boots, preparing to ride
the ski-lift. Although this “non-frontal”
nude cover has prevented the book from
being displayed on some shelves, it does
not misrepresent the contents.
The free spirit of Whistler in the seventies and Eighties was audacious—and
Vogler proves it.
Whistler, after all, is the birthplace
of freestyle skiing and home to the
world’s first snowboarding medalist,
Ross Rebagliati, the pot smoker
now running for office with the federal
Liberals. Free-style skiing and
snowboarding are sports that arose from
free spirits, from the people that Vogler
makes legendary.
✍
Once upon a time, not so long
ago, before Whistler was a place
for freedom and outlandish
partying. Old-school European
alpinists shared the slopes with
snow-hippies who lived rent-free
in rough squatters’ shacks where
folks listened to a lot of music, took
a lot of drugs, and basically didn’t
conform to mainstream (ie. VanAce “Longstocking”
couver/Victoria) values.
Mackay-Smith
Vogler has been a resident of
perpetuates the partyWhistler since he arrived there as
hearty atmosphere of
a child in 1976. He’s young
Whistler by hosting a rave.
enough to clearly and unflinchingly recall when Whistler had only 500
questions, on the final page, how the
year-round residents and all weekend
ever-expanding infrastructure of Whisvisitors were disdained as “gorbies.”
tler will impact the lives of his three chilAt age twelve, his “de facto teen cendren.
tre was the pinball machine at the 76
Along the way Vogler, a journalist,
gas station.”
carefully chronicles some hilarious anSince then Vogler has witnessed the
tics and remarkable characters.
evolution of the Whistler experiment
The story of how a 19-year-old
(hatched by the New Democrat governsquatter, and third cook at The Keg,
ment of Dave Bar rett) to the
named Nigel Protter started the
present day. Although he is never overtly
town’s first cappuccino service in a conopposed to the Olympics in his text, he
verted bus parked at the bottom of the
TOSHI KAWANO PHOTO
M
Whistler history traces evolution from
hippie hangout to gorbie gulag
Olympic Run in
1979—the Espresso
Express—is typical.
“As a teenager,” he
writes, “I remember
emerging from the fogenshrouded lower run
and seeing this beacon
of civilization; a hybrid
of hippie bus and fine
European café with a
spectacular view of the
landfill.”
The Espresso Express is accorded seven
pages. The history of the
Snow Goose fleet of
buses merits eleven
pages.
There are games of
shinny on Alta Lake,
the Party Barge, wet Tshirt contests, Blackcomb’s 1987 Sextathlon (possibly the world’s
first free-skiing competition) and the town’s vibrant live music
scene.
Vogler also offers an in-depth record
of the Whistler Answer newspaper started
by Charlie Doyle after he came
across a magazine article in Banff entitled, ‘Ski Bumming is Humming at
Whistler.’
Twenty years from now, if someone
writes a history of Whistler, most of the
details in Only in Whistler would likely
978-1-55017-504-2
disappear.
THE WAY WE WERE
BABES
ON THE
RANGE
How women have kept
the world turning in the
Cariboo and Chilcotin
Edited by Sage Birchwater, the
life stories of thirty-seven women
in Gumption & Grit: Women
of the Cariboo Chilcotin
(Caitlin $24.95), are an eye-opener
to conditions that were long
considered ‘normal’ in decades
when a horse was often the only
mode of transport.
Here follows an edited excerpt
from one memoir by Ger r y
Bracewell, born in Half-Way
Lake, Alberta in 1922.
From 1950 onwards, when she
wasn’t guiding, she was a fully capable rancher, building cabins,
Gerry Bracewell adopted a male sounding first name in order to become
viable as the Chilcotin’s first accredited female A-Guide outfitter.
roping, branding and castrating
calves alone in the range corral.
She broke her own horses,
built a twenty-four-room log lodge
and found time for motherhood,
raising four sons.
M
y first birthing experience turned
out to be impossible. It was January,
so the stage had
quit running. There were no snow
ploughs. We had only our team and
sleigh to get me thirty-seven kilometres
out to Tatla Lake where I was to meet
with a doctor. A neighbour had ridden
on horseback to the only phone, a party
line, relayed halfway to Williams Lake
by Alexis Creek, to get a doctor for me.
The doctor had to come with Bill Sharp,
the village police officer in Williams Lake,
by car, often shovelling through drifts
along the 230 kilometres of Chilcotin
Road.
When one of our team became exhausted from pulling the sleigh through
eighteen inches of snow, Mr. Moore (the
grandpa-to-be), borrowed a neighbour’s
horse. Our other horse, a mean-spirited
ex-rodeo bronc named Blackoby, after
Mr. Moore’s banker, soldiered on. He
won much praise from all of us. We arrived at sundown in Tatla Lake ahead of
the doctor.
The hospitable Graham family put
me into the master bedroom off the
kitchen. I lapsed into sleep several times,
finally aroused by much hustle and bustle when the doctor arrived. He was
washing his hands at the bedroom sink.
They had forgotten the rubber gloves.
A washcloth was draped over my face
and ether poured onto it. I zonked out.
A wild dream, all in technicolour,
took over…. Then I heard a baby cry.
I was awakened to see a light bulb
spinning crazily overhead. As it slowed
and steadied, I saw Dr. Mackenzie
splinting my baby’s leg. My son was delivered alive after seventy-four hours of
hopeless labour. His right femur had to
be broken mid-thigh to deliver him feetfirst. It was a partial breach.
Hodgson’s stage wasn’t due to come
through for two weeks. Within two days
I developed a devastating fever with
chills, which I fought with
every fibre of my being.
These were the days
before antibiotics. I couldn’t
die now, I had
a baby to care
for. Every day
my baby’s
s p l i n t s
worked down
and had to be
reset by the wonderful Graham family.
Hodgson’s stage finally arrived and took
me into the Williams Lake Hospital. My
baby was admitted, but not me.
Dr. Pump was the only resident doctor, but he was a good one. He re-broke
my baby’s leg, taped small square blocks
onto the soles of his feet and screwed cup
hooks into the blocks. Long strings were
fastened to the hooks, with the other
ends holding weights dangling off the
end of the crib. The baby lay on his back
with both feet up at a right angle to his
body. In a month I would be allowed to take him home.
Hodgson’s stage returned us to Tatla Lake,
where our team,
sleigh, and a driver
awaited us. It was a
long, cold thirtyseven kilometres, mostly
in the dark, on February 24, 1944. Within a
mile of the ranch, we
had to abandon the
sleigh and my box of
apples because the road
was too icy for the
horses. The teamster
took them up onto
brushy hillsides to find
safe footing. I carried
my baby in the freezing
dark over that icy road,
praying that we would
Gerry Bracewell: “I
carried my baby in the
freezing dark over that
icy road, praying that
we would not fall.”
not fall. The lamp in the window was a
halo of gold. Grandpa Moore was waiting up for us. He lovingly accepted his
grandson from my weary arms.
The war soon ended. My husband
returned to ranching and a baby brother
for Marty was born in June. But this idyllic family life was not to be. Interference
separated us. My husband left to aid his
mother with her ranch, and she found
him another soul mate. Eventually he
filed for divorce….
Grandpa was a Class A guide, which
permitted him to take hunting clients
after whatever big game was in season.
Whenever I could find a neighbour lady
to watch over my boys for the day, I’d go
along to learn the business….
Grandpa had apprenticed as a guide
outfitter with Ralph Edwards of Lonesome Lake. With spring bear hunting
and fall moose, mule deer, and bear
hunting, he needed an assistant guide….
One day Grandpa Moore asked, “So
how about it? I want to quit.”
Advertising consisted of writing thousands of letters. There were no phones
back then…. Thinking I was on the right
track, I put an expensive ad into Outdoor Life magazine, and received a dozen
letters from US hunters. The letters I
typed and mailed listed animals available,
dates, rates, maps, and a list of suggested
clothing. I also stated that I was a woman
guide outfitter. Bad idea. Not one answered. From then on, letters to Gerry
Bracewell were addressed to me, “Dear
Sir.”
On arrival, my guests accepted the
fact that their guide outfitter was a
woman…. After five years of me learning the business, Grandpa said, “You can
take over. I’m retiring.”
978-1894759373
The Invention
of the World
Jack Hodgins
Strange Bedfellows
The Private Lives of Words
쐍 Howard Richler
Richler’s wit and erudition make his fifth book on language a
must-have for all those intrigued by the the English language’s
reputation for “sleeping around.”
978-1-55380-100-9
6x9
160 pp
$19.95
Skin Like Mine
쐍 Garry Gottfriedson
A native poet like no other, Gottfriedson reveals what it feels
like to live First Nations in the changing landscape of band
politics and environmental degradation.
978-1-553380-101-6
6x9
100 pp
$15.95
Follow the Elephant
쐍 Beryl Young
A new edition of the novel that defined
British Columbia. “In the beginning” a giant bull
begets a sky god who brings an entire Irish
village to Canada. In the end, the whole of
Vancouver Island and perhaps the entire country
attend a rural wedding whose extravagance
propels everyday life into the extraordinary epic
world of modern myth.
In this young adult novel, a boy accompanies his grandmother
to India and establishes a mysterious relationship with the
elephant god, Ganesh, teaching him how to cope with his father’s
recent death.
978-1-55380-098-9
6x9
356 pp
248 pp
$10.95
Survivor’s Leave
쐍 Robert Sutherland
This young adult novel features two Canadian sailors whose ship
is torpedoed at sea during WWII and whose shore leave takes them
to a country house where they uncover a dangerous Nazi plot.
978-1-55380-097-2
978-1-55380-099-6
5-1/4 x 7-5/8
5-1/4 x 7-5/8
176 pp
$10.95
$18.95
Ronsdale Press
Available from your favourite bookstore or order from LitDistCo
Visit our website at www.ronsdalepress.com
THE WAY WE WERE
AS BIG AS
CALIFORNIA
O
ne hundred years ago,
George Eastman began selling the world’s first,
widely affordable, easy-to-use camera.
Coincidently, amateur photographers
were able to record the last great land
rush in North America: the white re-settlement of the Peace River region.
Consequently, Donald Pettit of
Dawson Creek has uncovered literally
tens of thousands of black and white unpublished prints during his research, selecting the best for The Peace: A
History in Photographs (Sandhill
$79.95).
“Mostly they documented personal
things: births and deaths, first homes of
sod and log, first harvests, community
and family gatherings. We see faces exhausted by tragedy, glowing with triumph, shining with hope and pride.
These are the pictures that fill my book.
When you look into their eyes, you can
feel them looking back.”
Shortlisted for the Roderick HaigBrown Prize, Pettit’s collection of archival photos tied for a gold award in the
IPPY (Indepenent Publisher Book
Awards) prize for Best Regional Book,
Western Canada, and also received an
honourable mention in the Eric Hoffer
Book Prizes in the Art category.
Some of the
68 competitors in the
annual Babyville sports
day event, sponsored by
the Better Babies Contest
Committee, Sunset Prairie,
B.C., 1934.
As big as California, the Peace contains one of North America’s great rivers,
the mighty Peace, 2000 kilometres long.
“It’s a sad fact that for many people who
have not traveled to the north,” says
Pettit, “the concept of the Peace River Region draws a blank in terms of its landscape, climate and history. It’s a region
that must be seen to be appreciated.”
978-0-9736678-4-4
WE WERE STARDUST, WE WERE GOLDEN
et in 1969, Tom
Wayman’s first novel
Woodstock Rising
(Dundurn $21.99) is a black
comedy in which counter-culture students in Laguna
Beach, California—including
a Canadian graduate stu-
S
Archaeology, goats and dogs, honor, ethics, lies and
betrayals are what can happen when two cultures abrade.
From HOPEACE PRESS
Janey Bennett’s
Award-winning novel
$21.95 at your bookseller now
ISBN: 978-0-9734007-2-4
Distribution by Steller Press
Tom Wayman
dent—break
into
a
mothballed missile silo to
commandeer a nuclear warhead, hoping to put their
own satellite into orbit in
homage to the recent
Woodstock music festival.
9781550028607
LOOKOUT
KAY MCCRACKEN
3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 • bookworld@telus.net
Once I’d set the date for the book
launch, I wasn’t about to back out. The
SAGA Public Art Gallery was booked,
invitations and press releases sent, even
as I felt the sickness of self-doubt gnawing at my insides.
About one hundred people showed
up. Something happened that night. I
think it was the love and support I felt
coming from family, friends and the
community because I transcended the
nerves that had plagued me my entire
life. The Shuswap Association of Writers sponsored my launch, writers donated time and baking, The Dust
Puppets played their toe-tapping music,
Patrick Allwood wrote and performed a very funny skit with my emcee, Clive Calloway. Everybody was
brilliant.
If there was a highlight it was
Bonnie Thomas’s talk. I’d given her
the manuscript to read. Her mother, Dr.
Mary Thomas, a highly respected
Secwepemc First Nations elder, was in a
couple of scenes in the book. I wanted
to make sure I wasn’t offending. She
gave such a moving tribute to my book
at the book launch that many people
were in tears.
My friends Deanna and Alex also did
themselves proud, reading from their
own books soon to be published by
Gracesprings. During the intermission,
I signed books and everything felt right.
I wasn’t hiding anymore. I’d thrown off
the cloak of invisibility and everywhere
I went after that people stopped to say
how much they loved the book or could
they buy a copy from me.
Emails began flooding in. People I didn’t know
called me at home. Praise for “Raven” was heady stuff.
It was better than any drugs I’d ever tried. I basked
in feelings of worthiness because it was apparent that
I’d written something that was touching people at a
deep level.
Writers should be forewarned not to expect their lives will greatly change if
The next day
they publish a book. However, Kay McCracken, has proved to be an exDeanna and I visited
ception to the rule.
Alan Twigg. I told him
No, her self-published account of running a bookstore was not optioned for
what I had told people
a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep.
at the Banyen event.
The Oprah Book Club has yet to call. And she hasn’t been invited to the
Publishing this book
Vancouver Writers Festival.
had changed my life.
But thanks to friends and family in Salmon Arm, the former bookseller has
“The idea that one can
felt herself transformed into someone who can boldly speak her own uncenbe happy is a radical
sored truths.
one,” he said. “Maybe
After a joyous book launch in her hometown for A Raven in My Heart: A
you should write about
Memoir (Gracesprings Collective $27.95), McCracken travelled to Vancouit.”
ver for a modest reading at Banyen Books where, for one hour, she and her
It has been five
Shuswap Valley friend Deanna Kawatski entertained a respectful gathering of
months now since I
a dozen people in a cramped but comfortable corner of the store.
launched Raven and my
It was enough.
life has changed. As I go
about the business of
promoting
and
distributing
my
book, I’ve noticed a
Arm—the presence of active white supremacists for
trait that wasn’t there before. Boldness! Radical boldone—that the city fathers (and mothers) were not
going to appreciate. Would I be stoned as I walked down
ness! It grows stronger every day. It comes from a willthe streets?
ingness to believe in myself, and what I’ve written.
And what about my family and friends? How
Call me naïve, but I’ll take it—I’ll take all this joy
would they react to seeing themselves portrayed on
that comes from allowing my uncensored self to have
a say.
the page? Should I have dredged up the family seLife dishes up enough heartache, so I’ll grab the
cret? Luckily, I had the support of the Gracesprings
Collective authors behind me. Alex Forbes,
joy while I can.
Caroline Woodward, Deanna Kawatski
and I had formed the collective about a year and a
[For more info on Kay McCracken and A Raven in My
half earlier, mainly to take control our work and to
Heart: A Memoir, visit www.gracespringscollective]
978-0-9809608-2-2
work in a spirit of cooperation.
IN BOLD PRINT
How ex-bookseller Kay McCracken
rescued her uncensored self.
I
DON’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS EX-
actly that pushed me over the
edge but I pulled up stakes and
moved to a small town in south
central British Columbia known as
Salmon Arm to start a bookstore. The
time had come to make a change. I felt
if I didn’t do it then, I never would.
What happened over the next five-and-a-half years
was great material for a book. My bookstore, called
Reflections, was peopled by quirky and wonderful
human beings, one ghost, and mysterious happenings—a story that begged to be told. After closing
Reflections (the irony was that I never had time to
reflect on much while I was managing it), I spent the
next ten years reflecting and writing about the experience.
Hundreds of drafts later I finally had a book and a
title to hang on it: A Raven in My Heart: A Memoir.
The symbol of Raven, the great Trickster, was most
appropriate and that becomes even more apparent
when you read the book.
All my fears and insecurities flooded back the
closer it came to print deadline. This was a very personal story and I was divulging things about Salmon
21 BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • SPRING • 2010
TWIGG PHOTO
“Call me
naïve, but
I’ll take it—
I’ll take all
this joy.”
a f o r u m f o r & a b o u t w r i t e r s # 38
THE WAY WE WERE
Here we continue our series about the origins of publishing
enterprises by focusing on the life and times of
Cherie Smith
.
Janina Stajic and researcher Helen Clay, both
Print Futures: Professional Writing students from Douglas
College, have recovered the story of how Cherie Smith, a 36year-old mother of two, started November House in 1969, releasing twenty-one titles, against a backdrop of male chauvinism, as
B.C.s first female book publisher.
C
HERIE SMITH CAME FIRST. AS ONE OF THE FIVE FOUNDING MEMBERS OF THE
As her friend Alice Zilber says, Cherie
Smith had an inner chutzpah that helped her
stand her ground. That chutzpah partially arose
from her Jewish heritage.
Cherie Smith’s grandfather Solomon
Steiman was sent to Viatka in the Urals, 450
miles north-east of Moscow, in 1914, as a political exile. His wife and family later joined him
there.
Born in Latvia in 1898, Cherie’s father Iser
Steiman was sent to Canada in 1912 when
he was 14. His experiences as a teacher in northern Manitoba, starving and freezing, are contained in the one book Cherie Smith wrote,
Mendel’s Children.
As a physician he started King Edward Hospital in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, where he married Laura Shastky. Their daughter Cherie
was born November 13, 1933.
✍
November House began at UBC, where Smith
earned her Honours degree in English Literature, about ten years after creative writing teachers Jan de Bruyn and Jacob Zilber had
decided to found PRISM in 1959. It was one of
the few literary magazines west of Toronto. Zilber,
a friend of the Smiths, asked Cherie Smith to
help. She took on the most difficult job, selling
advertising for a literary periodical. Ten years later,
out of the blue, Jacob handed her a manuscript
by Bill T. O’Brien, one of his students. “Why
don’t you start a small publishing company and
make this your first work?” he said. “We’ll copublish it with you.”
Cherie Smith consulted her husband and
decided she’d give it a go. That’s how 1,000 hardcover copies of Bill T. O’Brien’s novel Summer of
the Black Sun were published by “PRISM international in association with November House.”
She chose the name simply because her birthday
was in November. O’Brien’s fictional account of
a man in a mental institution garnered rave reviews from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates,
Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro
(who had published her first book the year before) who described it as “terrifying, desperately
funny.” Produced with the help of a Canada
Council grant, Summer of the Black Sun was selected by the Ministry of Education for B.C. for
inclusion in the high school curriculum. Paperback rights were sold to Simon & Schuster who
printed another 10,000 copies.
Diana Douglas
Cherie was delighted. But not everyone applauded. Buddy Smith, Cherie’s friends and colleagues take great pleasure in telling the story of
what happened next. They were all at a party
when a belligerent, SFU poetry professor ran up
to Buddy and declared, “You keep your wife on
a leash, or she’ll be in trouble.”
Buddy was flabbergasted. “First of all,” he
recalls, “I didn’t like him saying that. Second, I
don’t like anybody waving their finger in my face.
So I told him, ‘Take your finger out of my face
before I break it off!’”
The man had marched up to Cherie, interrupted her conversation with a group of friends,
and then demanded to know, “what business she
had publishing a piece of crap like Summer of
the Black Sun?”
With the author Bill O’Brien standing right
behind them, Cherie Smith tried to reason with
the unwanted critic, but he simply wouldn’t listen. Feeling she was being “verbally raped,” she
defended her author and herself by slapping her
verbal assailant—twice—across the face.
After Summer of the Black Sun, manuscripts
came pouring over the transom. “98 percent
were bad,” says Buddy Smith, “and the other two
percent [were] not very good.” When Charlie
Leeds’ manuscript, Tillie’s Punctured Romance,
was put into her hands by another UBC professor, Cherie knew she’d found November House’s
second book.
Not only did Cherie publish Charlie’s book,
she helped get him out of prison.
Charlie Leeds was a jazz musician who had
been sentenced to 25 years in a maximum security prison in New Jersey, having been arrested
for breaking into a drugstore at 3am. Charlie had
faced a zero-tolerance-to-drugs judge. Luckily for
Charlie, his book somehow found its way to
Cherie and, after publishing it in 1970, she began a correspondence with his prison warden.
She sent the prison warden Charlie’s book with
a note saying, “You know you have in that prison
this man who is a great writer.” Eventually the
warden agreed that Cherie and Buddy could visit
Charlie.
Buddy recalls the prison as a horrible place,
“We had to visit him through thick glass and by
telephone.” After the visit, Cherie was even more
determined to get Charlie released. She unearthed the name and address of the judge who
had sentenced him and began sending him let-
Female book publishers in B.C. have included Cherie Smith’s closest contemporary,
Diana Douglas (Self-Counsel Press), as well as Michelle Benjamin (Polestar
Press), Catherine Edwards (Pacific Educational Press), Maralyn Horsdal
(Horsdal & Schubart), Vici Johnstone (Caitlin Press), Anita Large (Theytus
Books), Ruth Linka (Touchwood Editions), Diane Morriss (Sono Nis), Naomi
Wakan (Pacific-Rim Publishers), Carolyn Zonailo (Caitlin Press) and the women
who collectively managed Press Gang.
UBC SPECIAL COLLECTIONS PHOTO
organization that became the Association of Book Publishers of B.C.,
“shy, internal Cherie” was seemingly dependent on her husband Buddy
Smith, whom she married when she was 18—but she had an ardent
love of literature, an adventurous spirit (her recipe for a happy voyage
on their boat included a complete state of undress) and a significant family history.
TRY TO REMEMBER THE KIND OF
NOVEMBER
22 BC BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • SPRING • 2010
The life and times of Cherie Smith
ters about Charlie. Through her efforts, Buddy
course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Carecalls, “he got out on parole and went onto a
nadian prairies over 100 years. It includes stories
methadone program.”
and memories of her relatives including her
After Summer of the Black Sun and Tillie’s Puncgrandfather Solomon Steiman.
tured Romance, the formal association with
Mendel’s Children received glowing reviews in
PRISM was dropped. By the early 1970s a group
the The Midwest Book Review, The Montreal Gaof publishers, including Cherie, began meeting
zette, and from Wayson Choy: “Cherie
to discuss the possibility of forming a professional
Smith’s family chronicle is written with such stoassociation. At that time, Buddy Smith owned
rytelling skill, with such an honest and compasHarry Sons & Co., a book wholesaling company,
sionate clarity, that the reader turns page after
so men still dismissed her as Buddy’s wife. Many
page with growing fascination.”
of the formative meetings were held at Cherie’s
In 1998 Cherie was diagnosed with cancer.
home, and she would often welcome her guests
By the end of the year she was living at home
with goodies. The gesture backfired;
under the care of a hospice nurse. DeCherie became known as “Mrs. Cookspite urgings from the nurse to “let go,”
ies.” Cherie stayed with the group long
Cherie Smith held on. Even though
enough to see November House beshe was bedridden and could barely
come a founding member of the Westspeak, she wanted to wait for the birth
ern Canadian Publishers’ Association,
of her third grandchild. When her
known today as the Association of Book
granddaughter was finally born, her
Publishers of B.C. Unwilling to tolerdaughter-in-law came straight from
ate sexist attitudes, she left the group
the hospital to Cherie’s bedside and
not long after it was fostered in her
placed the tiny baby next to her. And
Harry Rankin
home.
then everyday after that, she would
Cherie Smith published another
bring the child to lie with Cherie in
19 books including Allan
bed. Once the baby was born, the
Fotheringham’s first book, Colnurse again urged her to let go; she’d
lected & Bound, in 1972, along with
seen her grandchild. But she had to
David Evanier’s The Swinging
fulfill one more wish—to celebrate her
Headhunter. In 1973, November
and Buddy’s 47th wedding anniverHouse published Sister Roxy, a first
sary, which she managed to do on June
novel by Albertan Kenneth Dyba,
29th, before passing away on July 13,
another ex-student of Jacob Zilber.
1999.
November House went on to publish
Cherie Smith was never particularly
Dyba’s children’s book Lucifer and Allan Fotheringham interested in the ground-breaking naLucinda (1977) and The Long (and
ture of her achievements. She simply
Glorious) Weekend of Raymond (and Bingo)
loved literature and was determined to encourOblongh (1983), one of its two final titles.
age local writers by publishing books of high
Harry Adaskin, a violinist, broadcaster,
quality. And she continues to encourage budding
teacher and first head of UBC’s music departliterary talent. The Cherie Smith Prize in Creament, became a November House author after
tive Writing, a grant of $500, is available to creaCherie, relaxing in a bath, heard him on CBC
tive writing students at UBC, and the literary
Radio. She called him up, and November House
festival she founded now bears her name. The
ended up publishing two of his books: A FidCherie Smith Jewish Book Festival celebrated its
dler’s World: Memoirs to 1938, in 1977, and A
25th anniversary in, appropriately, November of
Fiddler’s Choice: Memoirs 1938-1980, in 1982.
2009.
Harry Rankin, a hugely popular city councillor, was also approached by Cherie, and in
November House Titles
1975 Rankin’s Law: Recollections of a Radical hit
FICTION
the bookstands.
Bill T. O’Brien: Summer of the Black Sun (1969)
During its 14-year-run, November House
Charlie Leeds: Tillie’s Punctured Romance, &
published an eclectic mix although Cherie tried
The Love Song of Rotten John Calabrese, plus
selected short subjects (1970)
to focus on non-fiction, controversial subjects and
David Evanier: The Swinging Headhunter (1972)
books about B.C. Cookbooks such as Denny
Kenneth Dyba: Sister Roxy (1973); Lucifer and
Lucinda (1977); The Long (and Glorious) Weekend
Boyd’s Man on the Range: or, How to Survive in
of Raymond (and Bingo) Oblongh (1983)
the Kitchen Without Really Crying (1973) were
Robert G Sherrin: The Black Box (1976)
published alongside First Nations’ stories, Legends
NON-FICTION
of the River People (1976), and local tales of inBarry Broadfoot: Stanley Park: an Island in the
terest: Stanley Park: an Island in the City (1971).
City — photography by Ralph Bower; text by
One of the last books from November House was
Barry Broadfoot (1971)
Jack Wassermann: Vancouver on 5,000 Calories
Feldafing (1983), the story of inmates from a cona Day: a Guide to Dining Out (1971)
centration camp who, after the war, took over
Allan Fotheringham: Collected & Bound (1972)
Harry Rankin: Rankin’s Law: Recollections of a
what had been a wealthy town in Bavaria in orRadical (1975)
der to heal from the trauma of war.
Harry Adaskin: A Fiddler’s World: Memoirs to
1938 (1977); A Fiddler’s Choice: Memoirs 1938Cherie Smith liked to say publishing was like
1980 (1982)
fishing. It was “incessant expectation followed by
Julian Smith: Rules to Keep the Rascals Out (1978)
perpetual disappointment.” She kept a picture
Simon Schochet: Feldafing (1983)
of two hands on the edge of a cliff, hanging on
COOKBOOKS
by the fingernails, representing the publishing
Denny Boyd: Man on the Range: or, How to
business. Cherie was publisher, editor and literSurvive in the Kitchen Without Really Crying
(1973)
ary agent. And she made hors d’oeuvres for book
National Council of Jewish Women of Canada:
launches. Dealing with disgruntled authors and
The Council Cookbook: a Treasury of Jewish
applying for limited Canada Council funding
Recipes. 5th Ed. (1974)
was hard work: “Douglas & McIntyre have had
DRAMA
a very rocky history,” says Buddy Smith. “Even
Betty Keller: Trick Doors and Other Dramatic
in Toronto, McClelland and Stewart had a diffiSketches (1974); Taking Off: a Practical Handbook
for Teachers of Creative Drama (1975); Opening
cult time…”
Trick Doors: a Guide to the Use and Production of
November House closed its doors in 1983.
the Sketches in Trick Doors (1975)
In 1984, Cherie Smith founded the Jewish Book
FIRST NATIONS
Festival and turned her hand to writing her famNorman H Lerman: Legends of the River People
ily memoir, Mendel’s Children (University of
(1976)
Calgary Press, 1997), a history that charts the
23 BC BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • SPRING • 2010
featureview
FICTION
DARKNESS AT THE
EDGE
of TOWN
B Y JOHN MOORE
Kaspoit! by Dennis Bolen
(Anvil Press $20)
K
aspoit!—that’s the noise
made by opening a beer
can, a crisp flatulence
so familiar it ought to be incorporated into O Canada, a sound
that’s usually evocative of barbecues, beach parties or the end
of a hard day.
But after imbibing Dennis
Bolen’s Kaspoit! you’ll never pop
another Canadian or Blue without cringing. In his latest and
darkest tale set among Vancouver’s criminal underclass, Bolen,
who has five previous books of
gritty fiction under his belt, uses
the sound to punctuate some of
the most squalid dialogue ever
put on paper, rendered all the
more horrific by its very banality.
In the novel, a Fraser Valley
pig farm owned by a not-toobright character named
Friendly serves as a private social
club for assorted Lower Mainland gangsters, who stand
around bonfires popping beers
and talking business while waiting for Friendly to return with
a carload of compliant or desperate women scooped from
the sidewalks of the Downtown
Eastside.
As a result of these debauches, women sometimes succumb to excesses of alcohol and
drugs or to the bizarre sexual
proclivities of some of the members. As host and hog-butcher
to the underworld, Friendly’s
job is to clean up the mess.
Of course this plot will ring
alarm bells with anyone who has
followed the case of William
Pickton, now our nation’s most
notorious serial killer.
The women are not the main
focus of the plot; they are not
even characters as such—an aspect of the novel that has already caused some critics to be
concerned with making sure
their politically correct jockstraps are in place. But they’re
missing the point.
After William Pickton was arrested, media and activist
groups had a field day speculat-
ing about why women were going missing from the Downtown
Eastside for years before the Vancouver Police or RCMP appeared to notice. That’s the
question Bolen tries to answer
in Kaspoit!
It’s a novel about perception
and agendas, about how what
we see, and what we think we
know, are determined by what
we’re looking for.
In the novel, local RCMP are
well aware of the pig farm’s role
as an ad hoc social club for the
scum of Vancouver, who refer to
the cops contemptuously as
“Ruckmumps” from the acronym of their insignia. In practice, police forces routinely
permit certain bars or improvised social clubs where known
criminals gather to continue to
operate because, in the face of
undermanned detachments
and tight budgets, it’s a cost-effective way of keeping track of
the bad guys.
Bolen, a career veteran of the
Canadian justice system after
more than twenty years as a fed25 BC BOOKWORLD SPRING 2010
CAROL SAWYER PHOTO
Reviewer John Moore says
Dennis Bolen’s dialogue-driven novel
Kaspoit! is as shocking as
“a slap in the face with a
bag of cold nails.”
eral parole officer, knows how
the system operates, what its priorities are, and how blurred the
line between tolerance and collusion can become. The novel
implies that even if Pickton’s pig
farm had been under 24/7 surveillance, it would ultimately
have made no difference because the cops would have been
clocking the comings and goings
of gangsters, not doing a headcount of women who incidentally came and went—or didn’t.
In three earlier novels featuring his parole-officer alter ego,
Barry Delta—Stupid Crimes (Anvil Press), Krekshuns (Random
House Canada) and Toy Gun (Anvil Press)—Bolen developed a signature style, a mix of Raymond
Chandler wit and Trailer Park Boys
goofiness you can’t quite call gallows-humour (since Canada repealed capital punishment), but
a sort of squalid slapstick that
makes the antics of his criminal
characters as pathetically funny
as they are scary.
Literary and dramatic arts traditionally create a critical dis-
tance between the audience
and horrific events that makes
it possible for us to face our worst
fears and experience a cathartic emotional resolution. Humour is one way of making the
unbearable bearable; we laugh
at the moronic screw-ups of
Trailer Park Boys because we
grew up knowing guys like
Julian, Ricky and Bubbles and
secretly remember that the
messes they generated were anything but funny at the time.
As Raymond Chandler once
said of the life on the mean
streets he chronicled, “It reads
better than it lives.”
In Kaspoit! the criminals are
no brighter than the low-lifes
who populate Bolen’s Barry
Delta novels, but the humour is
of the Hell’s Dark Roast variety
as the various characters—including a couple of visiting hitmen from the Montreal mob, a
senior RCMP officer and an
ambitious Eurasian cocktail waitress—attempt to exploit a power
vacuum created by a police sting
back east (Google Project
Colisee) that temporarily upsets
the apple-cart of organized
crime.
Abandoning the breezy cynical narrative commentary of the
Barry Delta novels, here Bolen
restricts himself to the more
challenging toolkit of the
dramatist and scriptwriter: descriptive action and dialogue
carry the plot alone, with none
of the gratuitous cheats of the
“psychological novel” or the interminable self-indulgent narrative commentary that is such a
soporific feature of so many Canadian novels produced by holders of MFAs in creative writing.
Bolen’s stripped-to-theframe, dialogue-driven story will
be as shocking to CanLit-conditioned sensibilities as a slap in the
face with a bag of cold nails, but
it is a brilliant exercise in
minimalism that shows how
much can be evoked with just a
few lines of authentic dialogue
and ‘narrative’ that amounts to
little more than stage direction.
A novel written almost entirely in dialogue plays on the irresistible human temptation to
eavesdrop and to continue to listen, with guilty shadenfreude, even
when what we hear appalls us.
In his quirky film, My Dinner
with Andre, director Louis Malle
demonstrated the seductiveness
of dialogue in a two-hour film
consisting of two old friends talking over dinner. Philip Roth
achieved a similar effect in a dull,
somewhat plotless novel that
consisted of nothing but the dialogue between a man and his
mistress in bed.
In Kaspoit!, Dennis Bolen has
created a terrifying and suspenseful thriller out of the kind
of table talk you could overhear
in certain clubs and bars no
more than a twenty minute drive
9781897535059
from your house.
John Moore, in Squamish, remains
one of British Columbia’s most original and un-self-censored book reviewers and fiction writers.
New & Recent from the Royal BC Museum
The Box
Images from the
Likeness House
George Bowering
Dan Savard
In this picturesque and insightful
book, Dan Savard explores the
relationship between First Peoples
in BC, Alaska and Washington
and the early photographers who
captured their likenesses on glass
plates and nitrate film.
The book features more than
250 photographs in a variety of
formats, from 1850 to the 1920s.
It is not only an important book
about photography, but a visual
statement about perception (and
misperception), cultural change
and survival.
Ten new stories from one of
our most accomplished writers
Blackberry Books • People’s
Co-op Bookstore • Pulpfiction
Books • Abraxas Books, Denman Island •
Galiano Island Books • Sorensen Books •
Pollen Sweaters, Lund • Chapters • Indigo •
chapters.indigo.ca • amazon.com
FIND IT HERE
$39.95
NewStarBooks.com
ISBN 978-0-7726-6150-0
Available in May 2010.
A complex, riveting novel about
love, death and the ties that bind.
Bannock and Beans
A Cowboy’s Account
of the Bedaux Expedition
Bob White
Edited, with additional material,
by Jay Sherwood
pulse
$18.95
LYDIA KWA
ISBN 978-0-2276-6060-2
Now available.
Available at your local book store.
The acclaimed author of
The Walking Boy.
Distributed by Heritage Group.
For more information about
Royal BC Museum books, go to
www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca
and click on Publications.
www.lydiakwa.com
Available at fine bookstores across Canada.
reviews
POETRY
SHORT LIST
CONNECT
THE UKES
is a door by Fred Wah (Talon $17.95)
H
aving been one of the founding
editors of the UBC poetry
newsletter TISH in the 1960s,
Fred Wah became a pioneer of
on-line publishing in midlife,
mentoring younger writers. “Of all
the writers who have developed out
of the TISH experience,” his longtime friend George Bowering
once wrote, “Wah was & is the
most poetical.” Wah’s latest poetry
collection is entitled is a door.
God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky
(Nightwood $17.95)
978-0-88922-620-3
“THERE IS NO ONE DEFINITION OF WHAT IT IS TO BE
Ukrainian,” says Elizabeth Bachinsky. “It’s not
a new story, nor an unknown one, but there
are over one million persons who claim
Ukrainian heritage living in Canada today.”
Suspecting many of her generation don’t
know historical truths about Ukrainians,
Bachinsky, has shared her exploratory selfeducation in her third collection of poems,
God of Missed Connections.
Bachinsky is unafraid to divulge her impressionable nature as a seeker of truth,
rather than a professor of it. Many poems
are strikingly original and candid; others can
be coy, opaque. At its best, Bachinsky’s work
is a shining example of how poetry can be
more revelatory than prose.
Possibly to avoid typecasting as an ethnic
writer, there is no clear indication of the subject matter in the packaging of the book,
but it has been shortlisted for the $25,000
Kobzar Literary Award presented biennially
to a Canadian writer who best presents a
978-0-88971-226-3
Ukrainian Canadian theme.
Fred Wah
Three Blocks West of Wonderland by
Heather Susan Haley (Ekstasis $18.95)
The Coast Mountains Trilogy: Mountain Poems,
1957-1971 by Dick Culbert (Tricouni $15.95)
STYLISTICALLY LIKE ROBERT SERVICE‘S POETRY, BUT
more in the tradition of Earle Birney’s poem
David, Dick Culbert’s poetry in The Coast
Mountains Trilogy: Mountain Poems, 19571971, illustrated by Arnold Shives, reflects
one man’s relations with nature and his
maturation process to adulthood.
Born in 1940 and raised in West Vancouver, climbing legend Dick Culbert provided
one of the first authoritative guides to major climbs in the West Coast Mountains in
oet and musician Heather
Susan Haley’s latest collection is Three Blocks West of
Wonderland which includes dynamic place and travel poems alluding to post 9/
11 angst and
guilt written in
her characteristically insightful
style. Previously,
Haley was publisher of the
Edgewise Café,
Heather Susan Haley
one of Canada's
first electronic literary magazines.
In 2009, she toured her spoken
word CD Princess Nut in Canada
978-1-897430-47-7
and the U.S.
P
Elizabeth Bachinsky searches for Ukrainian historical truths.
1965, updated in 1969. The period from
1960-1975 has been dubbed by others as ‘The
Culbert Era in the Coast Mountains.’
Culbert earned a Ph.D in geophysics
from UBC in 1971 and has long worked in
South America in his profession of mineral
exploration. He lives in Gibsons.
978-0-9811536-0-5
Stephen Bett’s Extreme Positions
(NY: Spuyten Duyvil Books $14)
ACCORDING
TO
PUBLICITY
MATERIALS ,
Stephen Bett’s Extreme Positions is a softporn spoof in which “each poem begins with
a simple blank-face, stark
naked line drawing of
‘boy & girl next door’ figures in utterly physically
impossible sexual ‘positions.’
Accompanying the
text are witty cultural or
literary allusions, a calorie
Stephen Bett
burn count for ‘him’ &
‘her,’ equipment required (deodorant,
etc.), cautions & hazards (such as requiring
a lawyer & /or chiropractor).” 978-0-923389-78-9
Marigolds by Daniel Rajala (Nanaimo: Match Stick
Publishing $12.50)
MARIGOLDS BY NANAIMO ’S DANIEL RAJALA IS A
David Zieroth received his Governor General’s Award for Poetry,
for The Fly in Autumn (Harbour $18.95), from Her Excellency The Right
Honourable Michaëlle Jean, 27th Governor General of Canada.
collection of love poems and meditations covering 1998-2009.
Raised in a working class family in
Campbell River, he attended the Vancouver
School of Art in 1973. Impressed by the impact of
a streaker at a Beach Boys
concert, he tried streaking one night, running
naked down Barclay
Street in Vancouver’s
Daniel Rajala
West End. He has continued streaking as a theatrical event.
In 2009 he cited Love Palace as his 27th
self-published book, but Marigolds is his first
perfect-bound collection. The title poem of
Marigolds concludes: "Even though my life
can feel / like a war ravaged land at times, /
there is some reassuring calmness to / be
found with something beautiful, / that I
brought into the world to look / at, on a
bright sunny Fall afternoon.” 978-0-9865051-0-2
LIVESAY
REMEMBERED
To recognize Dorothy “Dee”
Livesay’s residence on the North
Shore for approximately twenty
years during the thirties and forties,
the North Vancouver Library has allocated part of its new public plaza
on Lonsdale Avenue to be engraved
with four lines from Livesay’s bestknown poem, ‘The Unquiet Bed.’ A
ceremony was held on November
29 with readings of her work by
Pierre Coupey and Jamie
Reid. North Van mayor Darrell
Mussatto attended. Livesay’s
grandson Randall McNair will be
taking over ownership of Oolichan
Books from founder Ron Smith.
Dorothy Livesay as
Mrs. Duncan McNair in
North Vancouver, circa 1949
‘Th is book keeps you guessing, laughing and dropping
your jaw at the weird insights and awesomely daring
prose. Go read it. Or watch it. Or listen to it. Or
whatever it wants you to do with it, just do it.’
— Rebecca Brow n
More House
Hannah Calder
FIND IT HERE
Pulpfiction • People’s Co-op
Bookstore • Blackberry Books • Little
Sister’s Book & Art Emporium• Cadboro
Bay Books, Victoria • Sorensen Books, Victoria • Book Bonanza,
Quadra Island • 32 Books, North Vancouver • Chapters • Indigo •
amazon.com • chapters.indigo.ca
NewStarBooks.com
Flesh in the Inkwell
poems by Winona Baker
“Poems from a life” by B.C.’s
internationally celebrated
haiku and senryu poet.
So Large an Animal
poems by Bibiana Tomasic
An awakening from the
silence a child embraces
growing up in a Communist
country where only certain
things are ‘say-able.’
www.leafpress.ca
The Malahat Review
Far Horizons Award for Poetry 2010
est. 1945
Dare to Dream!
Canada’s premier
literary magazine invites
entries from everywhere
to Canada’s only
national contest for
aspiring poets who have
yet to publish a book of
their own. Submit up to
three poems per entry,
each poem no more
than sixty lines long.
Prize:
$500
(plus $40 per page)
Deadline: May 1, 2010
(postmark date)
Complete guidelines:
malahatreview.ca
Follow in the footsteps of
Don McKay
and Lorna Crozier…
The Malahat Review
Defining excellent writing
since 1967
Send your most
winning entry to:
The Malahat Review
Far Horizons Award
for Poetry
University of Victoria
Box 1700, Station CSC
Victoria, B.C., Canada
V8W 2Y2
1391 Commercial Drive
Vancouver, BC V5L 3X5
(604) 253-6442
reviews
BARRY PETERSON PHOTO
NON-FICTION
MISSING LAMBS & OTHER
RURAL BLEATS
Rustic philosopher and social critic Brian Brett
of Salt Spring Island has won the Writers’ Trust of Canada
Non-Fiction Prize for his Trauma Farm.
Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural
Life by Brian Brett (Greystone $35)
I
f you’ve lived in B.C. for
more than a couple of years
and you’re not a vegetarian,
chances are you have fond
memories of Salt Spring Island
lamb.
You may be wondering why
they are only memories.
The end of viable commercial sheep production on Salt
Spring is but one of many sad
and infuriating lessons in Brian
Brett’s award-winning Trauma
Farm, an immensely satisfying
meditation on farm life. [The
title is derived from the name
of his farm.]
It’s a vigorous meditation, if
there can be such a thing.
Brett’s confident prose, by turns
earthy and lyrical, jaunts
through the history of farming
from the ancient domestication
of the chicken to the twin
juggernauts of bureaucratic
over-regulation (bye-bye Salt
Spring lamb) and corporate
agribusiness (hello battery
hens).
The book is subtitled A Rebel
History of Rural Life, although it’s
hard to say just what Brett is rebelling against. Or maybe what
he isn’t rebelling against.
Contrarian, curmudgeonly and
often hilarious, he invites us to
join him on a one-day tour of the
farm that spans nearly two decades.
The conceit of an 18-year day
is just that, a narrative fig leaf in
place of plot. Which is good. It
frees Brett to let fly with observations and opinions on a
gallimaufry of topics in a corresponding panoply of forms—
polemical rants, a smidgen of
poetry, elegiac essays, and vignettes as short and sharp as a
Post-It note. (Note to would-be
authors: This is why you keep a
journal.)
But everything leads back to
the farm. Again and again he
points to the promiscuous profusion and interconnectedness
of plant and animal life on the
farm (and the planet)—and to
the consequences of our estrangement from that vitality.
Brett’s anger and
frustration at the conversion of food production
from
hands-on vocation to
soulless factory output
is palpable.
The unrelenting assembly
SHANE
lines force the workers to
clean and gut up to a
steer a minute . . . It often leads to
accidental piercing of the stomach
and the spraying of shit and intestines and their bacteria all over the
meat. By the time we see that steer
it’s washed and wrapped in plastic.
The bacteria aren’t necessarily eliminated. Then we eat it.
The author claims not to be
sentimental or anthropomor29 BC BOOKWORLD SPRING 2010
phic about animals. Fortunately
this is utter nonsense, as he
makes a convincing case for the
intelligence and individuality of
horses, dogs, pigs and even
chickens. But he can also be
clinical or barnyard blunt. Sometimes he is all three at once:
At Trauma Farm our fastidious
horse, LaBarisha, politely craps in
the same general area each day, providing manure. The sheep waste
hay, pulling it recklessly from the
racks in their sheds and shitting on
it. This provides another excellent
compost.
Into the first of a couple of
chapters on chickens (entitled,
alas, “Fowl Play”) Brett shoehorns a history of the bird’s domestication, the rise and fall of
its gene pool, an appreciation of
its barnyard society,
another condemnation of modern
megafarms, and reflections from Sappho
and Kenneth Rexroth
on the perfection of
the egg.
Then he describes
McCUNE
in detail how he
slaughters chickens. “That was
extreme,” gasps a college student who witnesses this procedure, and so it is. Elsewhere the
killing of a pig, and the reaction
of its sibling, sears the mind in
two or three stark sentences.
A comical description of an
osprey nagged by its mate into
snagging a goldfish from the
pond’s farm is followed imme-
diately by a description of the
bird holding his catch like an
ice cream cone, chewing the
face of the still-wriggling fish.
But it’s not all gore and guts.
There’s the crow that teases the
dog and the mouse so fearless
Brett can’t bear to kill it. There
are Zen-like reflections on chopping wood and weeding. (“If you
have a goal in a garden, you’re
doomed.”) There are Rabelaisian accounts of casual breakfasts
and extravagant feasts.
There are misadventures
such as the time his tractor ran
out of gas as he was using it to
“fluff up” a fire, and Brett and
his wife Sharon had to push the
machine out of the flames.
There are the local characters and the politics of the community fair. For some reason
Brett and his friends get big yuks
watching every member of a
work crew bang his head on the
same projecting beam.
For all I know Brett may be
an incompetent farmer—he
cheerfully admits his estate is a
money-loser—but gawd, he sure
knows a lot about crops and livestock and how they have been
cultivated and bred around the
world.
As he rambles purposefully
around Trauma Farm on this 18year day, extraneous facts drop
from his discourse like crumbs
from a ploughman’s lunch. Did
you know that Edward Jenner’s
experiments in inoculation,
while successful against smallpox, probably spread other diseases including tuberculosis,
which killed most of his family?
Or that “salaam,” Arabic for
peace, evolved from a word for
negotiations over salt?
These little nuggets are as
addictive as beer nuts, but Brett’s
editors might have reined in his
didactic streak a little. Was it really necessary to explain that
sashimi is sliced raw tuna?
If Trauma Farm held none of
this information, or if all of it
were wrong, it would still be
worth reading just for Brett’s
poetic turn of phrase. “As summer drives its hot fingers into the
earth . . . the sky was a propanefire blue . . . the pale armour of
a crayfish haunting the stones in
the creek bed;” every chapter
has a dusting of these gems.
True to his love for the heedless, wanton nature of nature,
Brett resists the temptation to tie
up his treatise with a tidy moral.
“Absurdity has lived with the
planet since the first cell divided,” he asserts. While he is
nothing if not spiritual, he sees
no personal god in “the gore,
the parasites, the gorgeous
birthings, those green leaves after a rain, the rusty nail in the
foot, a nasturtium blossom close
up, and the babies born headless while a tidal wave approaches.”
The only symmetry he offers
is that at the end of this elongated day, as at the beginning,
he pads naked into the woods.
978-1-55365-474-2
Shane McCune is non-agricultural,
non-trendy, former Province columnist who writes from Comox.
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YOKA’s Spring Literary pick is:
Stephen Miller’s
The Last Train to Kazan
(Penguin Books $24) 987-0-14305585-3
reviews
FICTION
SHORT LIST
NECESSITY
OF
KINDNESS
Song Over Quiet Lake by Sarah Felix
Burns (Second Story $18.95)
In her twenties, Sylvia Hardy is stymied
by her guilt about a traumatic incident
when she was a thirteen-year-old
babysitter in Medicine Hat. Eighty-twoyear old Lydie Jim is a Tlingit elder from
the Yukon who is soon to receive her
degree in women’s studies. Set in Vancouver during a wet spring in the late
1990s, Sarah Felix Burns’ Song Over
Quiet Lake concerns the unlikely friendship between these two students at
UBC. After her experiences in residential school and losing her sons to foster
care, Lydie still finds comfort from the
song her mother sang to her on the
shore of Quiet Lake. Born in 1977, the
author, who met a Tlingit woman much
like Lydie while studying at UBC, was
raised in a village outside of Sault Ste.
Marie. Her first novel Jackfish, The Vanishing Village won the 2009 Northern
Lit Award.
978-1-897187-67-8
Wonder and delight
in the life of a remote
African community.
BY
CHERIE
THIESSEN
The Moon’s Fireflies by Benjamin Madison
(Oolichan Books $18.95)
T
Benjamin Madison wears a turban in India, while the boy on the left plays with a toy gun.
Smith was sufficiently impressed
by the stories that he offered to
issue them anew after Madison
had self-published a collection
from Trafford called Night Studies in 2004.
“I had seriously underestimated the challenges of selfmarketing,” says Madison. “Very
few copies were sold and the
book came and went without
notice.”
Two additional stories have
been added and the collection
was re-edited. In a story called
‘Clifford,’ Madison skillfully
employs wry humour to counterbalance the ignorance and arrogance of some foreigners who
have come to ‘help’ with the graciousness and generosity of the
villagers. In the final story,
‘Unique Data,’ the extreme ignorance of two foreign workers
is exposed too blatantly, lacking
the gentle irony to which I’d
become accustomed.
Some things, like Cabernet
Sauvignon, need time to develop their flavours. Benjamin
Madison feels that way about his
stories derived from events
more than twenty years before.
“I missed Africa terribly and
writing about it was a way of returning,” he says. “We often take
years to fully understand
intense experiences, and often
an experience will only be fully
understood in light of later
events.
“I needed the distance that
time provided to let these
stories crystallize. I also needed
physical distance. I found it
much easier to write about Africa when I was not there.”
The Moon’s Fireflies is wrapped
in nostalgia, and a gentle yearning is diffused into the humour.
For some, the charming grace
of Alexander McCall Smith’s
No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, set in Botswana, might easily come to mind. So pour that
glass of Cabernet and settle
down for a mellow evening of
reading about the necessities of
tolerance and kindness.
978088982-263-8
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction
from Pender Island.
Wax Boats by
Sarah Roberts
(Caitlin $17.95)
The debut story
collection by
Sarah Roberts
of Gibsons, Wax
Sarah Roberts Boats, mainly
concerns the action within a rural island community on
the West Coast. Roberts thanks her
teachers Jack Hodgins, Pat Lane
and Andreas Schroeder, as well as
editors and friends Nadine Petersen
and Patricia Wolfe, with a significant
nod of appreciation to the Hammond
family, “the finest clan of writers/heroes/
artists I have ever known.” Her Sunshine
Coast stories of rough-hewn characters
are within the local tradition of Dick
Hammond’s oral narratives and the
hijinks of The Beachcombers.
978-1-894759-40-3
WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH A STORM
BY
CHERIE
THIESSEN
Jancis M. Andrews’ first
collection of short fiction, Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let Down Your Hair, was
published by Ronsdale Press in 1992. Seventeen years later, she has returned to print
with ten stories that comprise Walking on
Water.
In the title story, Lucy Gustavson has been
the lead soprano at St. David’s Church for
forty years—so no wonder she can’t hit all
the notes anymore. Now the church choir
will be singing before the Queen, and poor
Lucy has just learned that someone else will
sing her Easter solo.
Lucy overcomes her crushing disappointment by finding meaning in happenstance,
and even takes advantage of it. Life is full of
struggle and dashed hopes, so Andrews is
much concerned with glimmers of redemption.
In ‘Balancing,’ Annie, a housewife and
mother trapped in an abusive relationship,
tries to find an emotional outlet by anonymously hurling back as good as she gets.
Luckily, she’s thrown a lifeline by the sympathetic and saint-like doctor she has targeted for her vitriolic phone assaults.
In ‘Phoenix Rising,’ Phoebe crawls up
and out from her devastated marriage to
try for a little of that elusive happiness, and
with a title like ‘Phoenix Rising,’ it appears
her attempt may pay off.
In ‘The Hour of Miss Frith,’ Megan
Smith of Ladies Hats in the crumbling
Laidler’s Department Store puts up a heroic defense as she and her hats go down in
dignified defeat. Although some of the
Walking on Water by
Jancis M. Andrews
(Cormorant $21)
BETTY PEHME PHOTO
rained as an anthropologist, Benjamin Madison
lived in several West African countries for seventeen
years, working in education and
development. His 16 stories in
The Moon’s Fireflies chiefly arose
from his stint as an English
teacher in Nigeria at Udong
Community School.
The title arises from the local language, Oron, in which
stars are named after fireflies. In
English nta-nta affiang means
the moon’s fireflies. This delicious derivation would never be
known if Madison had not been
studying Oron, something his
colleague, Clifford, feels is a
waste of time, as only 50,000
people speak the language.
Knowing some of the local
tongue opens doors and universally adds smiles to faces. Thus
the title captures what is mainly
the tone of the book: wonder
and delight in the life and people of a remote community.
In several stories, readers’
chuckles will disappear as Madison describes some of the starker
realities of the ‘happy, simple
life.’ Malaria is just as common
as those fireflies, routinely taking children away.
In another story, there is a
sudden tragedy and murder;
the teacher tackles his fear of
monsters with his smile and is
rewarded, only to realize in the
end that the menace he perceived was very real indeed.
Madison’s stories are time
capsules, enclosing a culture
and past way of life. “Although
many Africans still live in villages
like those in the book,” he says,
“one of my motivations for writing these stories was to record
some valuable aspects of a world
that was rapidly changing.”
In a story called ‘Affiog,’ students in Office Studies are learning how to answer imaginary
telephones and use old typewriters, devices they have never
seen in their village.
All of the stories, set in the
present tense, reflect some aspect of a vanishing way of life in
the tiny southeastern Nigerian
village of Akai Ison. Criss-crossed
by footpaths, not roads, and
filled with magic and juju (black
magic), it’s a place where travel
is mostly on foot or in a sevenmetre canoe ‘taxi.’ Electricity is
non-existent and running water
is only in the rivers and streams.
There’s so much love and
longing in Madison’s pages that
readers may find their mood
suddenly growing mysteriously
melancholic. Publisher Ron
Jancis Andrews: meanings in happenstance
characters in this collection seem stereotypical, I loved this feisty senior. The story is
sadly humorous, the characters and their
actions are credible, and Miss Firth stands
alone in her heroic and ludicrous nobility.
‘Scheherazade at Noon’ gives readers a
close-up of an obese, obsessed woman, and
the sister who tries to save her from a lawsuit.
In ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew You,’ schoolmates Johnny and Marjorie reunite far too
late. Johnny realizes that for years he has
been brushing up against the love of his life.
I wish I could care more about Johnny
and Marjorie, or Phoebe, or those prickly
sisters in ‘Scheherazade at Noon,’ but ultimately it’s only Miss Frith who rose up to
claim my affections. Some of Andrews’ images are too obtuse. For example, I had difficulty with ‘workmanlike teats’ (‘Moon
Calf’) or the ‘rotating balloons’ that
made up Kathy’s gargantuan bum.
(‘Scheherazade at Noon’).
A stronger impression is made by the autobiographical ‘Country of Evil’ which won
Event Magazine’s creative non-fiction contest. It focuses on the blitz of London and
the realization of a seven-year-old girl that
evil is ubiquitous and faceless.
Raised in England during W.W. II, Jancis
M. Andrews ran away from a violent home
when she was 14, so there’s little doubt she
has had first-hand experience of the evil
she writes about—or the disappointment.
Having joined the Women’s Royal Navy
at 18, serving in Malta as a radio operator,
Andrews married a sailor at age 21 and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1965,
at age 31. She moved with her family to
West Vancouver in 1971. At 36 she went
back to school to finish her last four years
of high school. At 53, she went on to obtain
her M.F.A. from the University of British
Columbia.
“My husband walked out after 43 years,”
she has written, “wouldn’t pay wife support,
so at age 65 I worked as a cleaning lady to
help me buy my little house here in
Sechelt, where I invited two homeless cats
to live with me. Now the three of us sleep
in the same bed, which is highly uncomfortable (for me, not them).”
Jancis M. Andrews can still hit the high
notes in fiction. But the strength of ‘Country of Evil’ makes the reader wonder if perhaps more autobiographical works are
978-1-897151-17-4
meant to follow.
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
ANVIL
PRESS
new titles
MATERNITY ROLLS
Pregnancy, Childbirth and Disability
HEATHER KUTTAI 9781552663424 $18.95
The body with disabilities is often seen for what it
cannot do. Author Heather Kuttai, who has been
spinal cord injured since childhood, took on the
role of mother and found that it gave her body
a different value, status and worth.
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
The Working-Class
Alternative to Capitalism
ALLAN ENGLER 9781552663462 $15.95
Kaspoit! | Dennis E. Bolen
ABOUT CANADA: ANIMAL RIGHTS
JOHN SORENSON 9781552663561 $17.95
A Room in the City represents Gasztonyi’s
five-year project of photographing the
residents of the Cobalt, Balmoral, Regent,
and Sunrise Hotels in Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside. They are represented
in private moments, with respect and
dignity. Gasztonyi’s style continues in the
great tradition of Josef Koudelka, the
photographer of the Roma.
ISBN 978-1-897535-28-8
$45 | 200 pps. | April
The Devil You Know | Jenn Farrell
Adopting Mahatma Gandhi’s idea that “the
greatness of a nation and its moral progress can
be judged by the way its animals are treated,” this
book considers the status of animals in Canada.
Haida Eagle Treasures
Tsath Lanas History and Narratives
Pansy Collison
—Alex Varty, The Georgia Straight
A Room in The City | Gabor
Gasztonyi
ISBN 978-1-897535-06-6
$18 | 176 pps. | April
F E R N WO O D
P U B L I S H I N G
critical books for critical thinkers
www.fernwoodpublishing.ca
“a tour de force of thug-life horror, the book
is a fictionalized account of what might have
gone on at a certain Port Coquitlam pig farm
where the DNA of 32 women was found
during a massive forensic investigation. If
you’ve ever felt that the publication ban on
Robert Pickton’s speedy trial and conviction
smelled strongly of cover-up, this is for you.”
ISBN 978-1-897535-05-9
$20 | 258 pps. | available now
Coming this spring from...
Vancouver’s Al Engler argues that the working
class should and can democratically replace
competitive capitalist entitlement with equal
human entitlement, plural social ownership
and workplace democracy.
Haida Eagle
Treasure
contains an
eclectic
collection of
writings that
capture the
culture and life
of the Haida people
from the perspective
of an insider.
Pansy Collison, a
Haida woman,
speaks for
her people
and to her
people in this
illuminating title.
Isbn: 978-1-55059-388-4;
$25.95; pb; 200 pages;
b&w; illustrated.
Detselig Enterprises · 210 1220 Kensington Road NW, Calgary, AB ·
p. 403-283-0900 · f. 403-283-6947 · www.temerondetselig.com
These stories deal with the familiar territory of
sex, love, work, birth, and death. The characters
in The Devil You Know are tested by their
circumstances, whether it’s the sudden death
of a parent, an unintended pregnancy, or the
painful realization that a friendship is not what
it seemed. These life changes bring them to
new realizations about themselves and their
role in the world.
The Waterbird | Robert Strandquist
Tess and June have flown to Hawaii: one to
find love and the other to write a novel. The
novel is about a clairvoyant detective by the
name of Justin Chase, who just happens to be
on the case in Hawaii. Hired by romance
novelist Teresa Swimming to track down a
mysterious anti-freeze magnate named Olor
Columbianus, Chase soon finds himself in
charge of saving the world. Meanwhile, loves
blooms within a nearly happy ending.
ISBN 978-1-897535-07-3
$18 | 168 pps. | April
Wombat | Rod Filbrandt
Down those rain-slick, neon-lighted
streets Chandler sent Philip Marlowe;
meanwhile, a few blocks over, several
decades later, Vancouver’s Rod Filbrandt
sent his own knight errant and holy
fool—a man in a porkpie hat, a
sportshirt, and pants that can only be
described as trousers. A man known by
a single name only: Wombat.
ISBN 978-1-897535-06-6
$18 | 168 pps. | April
—John Armstrong (AKA “Buck Cherry”)
From the Introduction
Contemporary CanLit with a
Distinctly Urban Twist
anvilpress.com
This is a moving
story about tolerance,
compassion and the
power of family ties.
Ellen’s Book
of Life
E\-RDQ*LYQHU
($17.95 Groundwood)
ISBN: 978-0-88899-853-8
A young adult novel.
ZZZJURXQGZRRGERRNVFRP
interview
THEATRE
Another Home Invasion
by Joan MacLeod (Talonbooks $16.95)
F
✫
BC BookWorld: You insist
that your writing students get on
their feet and perform their
work. That they move….
Joan MacLeod: Yes, I want
to remind them that theatre is
a physical art form.
BCBW: But Jean in Home Invasion is elderly—there’s minimal
physical action.
JM: Yes. An old lady sitting in a
chair! It doesn’t sound like risky
theatre, but it is risky theatre! I
didn’t want this to be a play
where she’s making coffee for
invisible people. It’s a direct address to the audience. She’s got
a story and she wants to tell it.
And she’s old. In her eighties.
She’s in good health, but it takes
pretty much everything she has
to tell her story.
Old people are still a lot of
the time. So in the play, she gets
up, I think, three times. And for
a couple of those times it’s kind
of incidental, she’s got some
aches and pains. And then there
is one time she is imagining she
is with her husband, and she
goes down on the floor, beside
him. And because she had been
THEATRE OF THE
UNHEARD
Playwright Joan MacLeod
looks at home invasions—from the state—in terms
of how we care, and don’t care, for our elders.
so still throughout the play, it’s
quite powerful watching Nicky
do it. It’s hard to go down on
your knees on the floor when
you’re old.
BCBW: You trigger the play
with this incident of a stranger
barrelling into Jean’s life; but
that isn’t the primary story.
You’re exposing a home invasion very different from the kind
we read about in the
papers.
JM: It’s about how the
health care system is
failing people, in our
province in particular,
and the effect health
cuts have had on seniors. I reference Frank SARA
and Fanny Elbow in
Princeton, who were separated
and how they were both dead
within two weeks. What a tragedy. Similar scenarios played out
two or three times while I was
writing the play.
Jean is really ready to move
into a place; she needs help.
That mantra—keep people in
their homes as long as possible—
has been abused. My mom was
in her apartment way longer
than she should have been. It
was hard on her, hard on her
family. She needed help and she
didn’t get it soon enough. And
my mom’s rest home is typical:
85 per cent are women. They
nursed their husbands, looked
after them until they died, and
then they’re on their own. What
a strong bunch of women. What
a silent bunch of women. I just
found that moving.
BCBW: I’m tempted to refer
to you as a political writer, but
the label always lands wrong. It
cheats your work.
JM: I do write about
real life events and
try to get inside
headlines. But ultimately I hope they’re
deeply humane plays
and pieces of art, as
CASSIDY well.
BCBW: Can politics
compromise the literariness of
a written work?
JM: It sure can. I’ll start a play
upset about something, so I
guess that’s a political stance—
wanting to change something.
But characters take over and
they’ll hijack that intent many
times over before the play is finished.
BCBW: And you allow that to
happen.
JM: Yeah, I want to be true to
the character. So the character
and the event that inspired the
play get further and further
apart and I find the character’s
own event, if that makes sense.
BCBW: Jean never turns
around and says anything about
the health care system.
JM: No, that wouldn’t be her
way at all. She’s not used to saying what she needs and what she
wants in a loud, clear voice.
That’s just not on the radar for
her. When she’s pissed off at the
social worker, she says someone
pulled the wool over me and
she’s mad, but that’s as direct as
that character is ever going to
get.
Some plays really are a call to
action, but not mine. I don’t really think that much about it. I
just want (the audience) to have
a good night in the theatre, to
listen, and take away what they
will. I like to get to the heart of
someone and tell her story. And
sometimes that crosses onto political turf and sometimes it
doesn’t.
BCBW: Your protagonists are
often women whose stories
haven’t been told.
JM: Yeah, there’s not a lot of
Jeans on the stage right now. And
I like that. She’s getting her time
and Nicky makes sure she uses it
well. When we were premiering
in Calgary, she takes her time and
makes eye contact with people
LAURA SAWCHUK PHOTO
or anyone who has followed Joan MacLeod’s
vigorous, humane and
much-acclaimed work as a playwright, from her 1991 Govenor
General Award winner Amigo’s
Blue Guitar, about a Salvadoran
refugee, to the GG-nominee
Shape of a Girl, written in the wake
of Rena Virk’s brutal murder in
Victoria, to Homechild, about British children shipped to Canada
as indentured labourers around
the turn of the last century, it’s
not surprising to learn her newest play presents the voice of
someone dealing with injustice.
But in Another Home Invasion, MacLeod for the first time
allows a character to directly address the audience. Another
Home Invasion is a deliciously
readable monologue.
Jean is an elderly B.C. woman
who is unable to care for her
home or her ailing husband.
She must decide what to do
when the government decides
the only available solution is to
have them live separately.
The play’s title seemingly refers to a stranger’s chaotic incursion on her doorstep. But it soon
becomes clear--as Jean describes
her beloved, yet erratic and dependent husband, a flippant
granddaughter, a distracted
daughter, and a steel-cold social
worker--that Jean’s home security is being threatened on multiple fronts.
MacLeod created the role of
Jean for actor Nicola Lipman,
who dazzled at the play’s opening at the Tarragon Theatre, and
will now perform the play on a
cross-country tour.
The warm and down-to-earth
Joan MacLeod was interviewed
by Sara Cassidy at the University of Victoria where MacLeod
is a full-time professor in the
Writing Department.
and establishes that contact.
It’s her shot, her opportunity
to tell her story. [Director] Richard Rose calls it her complaint.
BCBW: Ric Knowles, in his introduction to the book, notes
how breaking down the fourth
wall like that traps the audience
in the story. We can’t see where
the unreliability is with the narrator.
JM: Yes. You don’t have any
other characters so you have to
go with her version. And make
your own decisions. And she’s
got her blind spots, she’s not a
self-aware character, so you have
to do some of her work for her.
BCBW: You dedicated Another
Home Invasion to your husband.
Why?
JM: Because it is about marriage. Ultimately it’s a love story.
And he manages the fort when
I’m running off to rehearsal...
BCBW: In 1987, you played the
protagonist in your own play,
Jewel, about the Ocean Ranger
disaster, when the actor hired
for the part left the show at
dress rehearsal. How did that
affect you as a playwright?
JM: it was really lucky for my career; critics knew who I was, that
I’d stood up and done this thing.
And it teaches you to edit, that’s
for sure. And just to know what
an audience feels like was really
valuable for me, because it’s very
different on the stage than it is
sitting in the audience. I’m like
most playwrights: I’m all paranoid, feeling responsible and a
little out of control. When
you’re acting you actually have
a little control over the material.
But there’s just a sense of goodwill that comes from the audience, and I didn’t know anything
about that. It’s just fabulous. It
was very uplifting. They’re not
out to get you. They’re not waiting for you to make a mistake.
BCBW: Do you have what you
would call a writing life?
JM: Not lately, being a full-time
professor. I don’t write at all during the academic year. There’s
just no time. Teaching’s demanding. Good demanding. I
love it. But we have four months
where we don’t teach, and that’s
my writing time. I love teaching.
I only wish I didn’t have to give
grades to people.
BCBW: Is there anything you’d
like to add? Maybe about the arts
in general?
JM: Well, damn all these funding cuts. It’s awful. We’re really
going to see how it affects theatre with the upcoming season.
There’s going to be less new
work, less money for things, a lot
of small companies folding. So
certainly, less opportunities for
my students. Ironically, it’s probably a good time to be an established playwright with a
one-person show. So that’s kind
of depressing. And you know,
theatre goes on no matter what.
So there’s also a bit of to hell with
them in terms of funding. People will still make theatre.
978-0-88922-622-7
Sara Cassidy writes from Victoria.
reviews
TROUBLED TEENS
by Tanya Lloyd Kyi
art by Ross Kinnaird
A red-hot feast of fiery
facts for ages 9 and up.
At-risk girls; escaping a convent; confined to a
wheelchair; and the mystery of stolen dinosaur bones
Best Laid Plans by Christine Hart (Lorimer $9.95)
| annick
A
S AN EMPLOYMENT COUNSELLER MEETing at-risk youths, Christine Hart of
Victoria has written her second
young adult novel Best Laid Plans about a
teenage girl, Robyn, who tries to leave her
family in order to attend university even
though her parents want her to stay in the
Okanagan and work on the family's failing, 20-acre apple orchard at Coldstream.
“I had been exposed to at-risk youth as
a high school student," says Hart, “and then
later as a working professional. In both
cases, I was repeatedly meeting young people who were being held back by their own
parents. I wanted to communicate how difficult it can be for young people when it’s
your parents who are the barriers to your
978-1-55277-446-5
future plans.”
press | www.annickpress.com | available from your favourite bookseller
Wheels for Walking by Sandra Richmond
(Groundwood $12.95)
The Girl in the Backseat by Norma Charles
(Ronsdale $10.95)
LIKE HER BOOK RUNAWAY IN WHICH A GIRL FLEES
from a convent, Norma Charles’ The Girl
in the Backseat is a YA novel of escape,
but this time on a larger geographical scale.
Trapped within a repressive Bountifulstyle religious community (in which young
girls are forced into marriages with much
older men), a young girl named Toby takes
flight from her marital fate by hiding in
the back seat of a mini with the help of
Jacob and Minerva, black children of a Caribbean mother who has recently remarried a penny-pinching Englishman. As
they make their way towards Winnipeg, a
place in which Toby will take refuge with
her sympathetic aunt, the threesome
share adventures and expand their horizons, literally and figuratively.
978-1-55380-056-9
Dinosaur Fever by Marion Woodson (Dundurn $11.99)
BORN IN INDONESIA IN 1948, SANDRA RICHMOND
was a mother of two and schoolteacher
who died of breast cancer in 1998. Based
on her own accident that made her into a
quadriplegic, Richmond’s teenage novel
Wheels for Walking, first published in
1983, is about a young heroine
who is confined to a wheelchair after her spine is
damaged in a car accident. Royalties from
the new edition will
benefit the BC Cancer Society and GF
Strong Rehabilitation Centre’s spinal
research program.
IN MARION WOODSON ’S LATEST TEEN NOVEL,
Dinosaur Fever, 15-year-old Adam Zapotica
of Calgary befriends a 15-year-old girl
named Jamie on a contemporary dinosaur
dig—even though participants are supposed to be eighteen years of age
or older. Together they uncover
the mystery of who has been
pilfering some of the important finds made by the
paleontologists on Milk
River Ridge near Writing-on-Stone Provincial
Park in southern Al978-1-55002-690-0
berta.
978-0-88899-866-8
Christine Hart:
“I think my setting is
unique, for young
adult readers, in that
I try to authentically
represent rural
British Columbia.”
A wildly entertaining and poignant novel,   explores, on a personal
level, family relationships, and on a political level, the continuing debate
about Jewish identity and its connection to Israel and Palestine.
The Briss
Michael Tregebov
People’s Co-op Bookstore
• Pulpfiction • Blackberry
Books • Cadboro Bay Books, Victoria •
Hager Books • Tanners Books, Sidney •
Abraxas Books, Denman Island • 32 Books,
North Van • Chapters • Indigo • amazon.com
• chapters.indigo.ca
NewStarBooks.com
DANI BOYNTON PHOTO
FIND IT HERE
KIDLIT
The first new book in five years from
Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award winner
Barry McKinnon
Annabel
Lyon
FOR YOUNGER READERS
All-Season Edie by Annabel Lyon (Orca $8.95)
IN ANNABEL LYON’S FIRST WORK OF JUVENILE FIC-
tion, All-Season Edie, eleven-year-old Edie
responds to the illness of her beloved
grandfather by acting out—trying to practice witchcraft, ruining her older sister’s
party, learning flamenco dancing and
meeting Zeus at the mall while Christmas
978-1-55143-713-2
shopping.
Shin-chi’s Canoe by Nicola I. Campbell and
Kim LaFave (Groundwood $18.95)
RAISED IN THE NICOLA VALLEY, NICOLA I. CAMPBELL
of interior Salish (Nle7kepmx, Nsilx) and
Métis ancestry, along with illustrator Kim
LaFave of Roberts Creek, has won the
$25,000 TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, presented by the Canadian
Children’s Book Centre, for their second
book, Shin-chi’s Canoe, about a young girl
named Shi-Shi-etko’s return to residential school for a second year, this time accompanied by her six-year-old brother
978-0888998576
Shin-chi. It’s for ages 5-8.
Graffiti Alphabet by Olga Campbell
(Blue Truck Press $22.95)
OLGA CAMPBELL’S GRAFFITI ALPHABET IS A COM-
pilation of her photographs of graffiti
taken in Metro Vancouver. It celebrates
the creativity and energy of this urban art
form. The 96-page book is suitable for
children, but is also an art book for adults.
978-0-9812911-1-6
Old Mother Bear by Victoria Miles
(Chronicle $16.95)
Grim Hill: The Secret Deepens
by Linda DeMeulemeester (Lobster Press $10.95)
LINDA DEMEULEMEESTER’S THE SECRET OF GRIM HILL,
finds heroine Cat Peters uncovering the
truth behind Grimoire, a mysterious,
posh, private school that is offering scholarships for the winners of a Hallowe’en
soccer match. After Cat discovers an entire soccer team disappeared many years
ago, she confronts diabolical fairies to save
a spellbound town. Inspired by Celtic mythology, it was nominated for the Ontario
Library Association’s Silver Birch Award.
In DeMeulemeester’s sequel, Grim Hill:
The Secret Deepens, Cat’s little sister,
Sookie, unwittingly unleashes a brutal winter and a strange sickness when she dabbles in magic. Cat must accept help from
her rival on the boy’s soccer team in order to again save the town. 978-1-897073-97-1
The First Beaver by Caroll Simpson (Heritage $24.95)
CAROLL SIMPSON’S SELF-ILLUSTRATED STORYBOOK
for ages 6-11, The First Beaver is about a
girl born with brown hair—instead of
black—who becomes strong in spite of her
difference from others. The book includes
a glossary of crests and their significance
in First Nations culture. Simpson taught
Native art and drama for many years before buying Ookpik Wilderness Lodge, a
fishing lodge on Babine Lake, in northern
B.C. She sees her work as a celebration of
the legends and art of the First Peoples of
978-1-894974-50-9
the Northwest.
volves two children, Emily and Matt, who
are time travellers in Canada courtesy of
the Canadian Flyer, a magical, antique red
sled. Eighth in the series, A Whale Tale
takes the pair to Nootka Sound in 1778,
coincidental with the arrival of Captain
James Cook, where they meet Chief
Maquinna and a protective mother whale
and her baby. Illustrated by Dean Griffiths
978-1-897349-16-8
of Duncan.
Books & Co., Prince
George • Misty River Books, Terrace
• Galiano Island Books • Pulpfiction
• People’s Co-op Bookstore • Blackberry Books •
Cadboro Bay Books, Victoria • Sorensen Books, Victoria • Chapters •
Indigo • chapters.indigo.ca • amazon.com
JESSICA ELLENOR, WHO’S WORKED IN FILM PRODUCtion, and as an overseas nanny, looks for
stories wherever she travels. The daughter of a professional story teller, she found
inspiration in a German medieval castle.
The heroine of Princess Annabella, burdened with a shockingly long nose and
bound by a parental and royal decree that
she marry before her next birthday, endures an endless parade of foul-smelling,
large-eared, goat-bearing, shiftless and
1-60441-940-7
deceitful suitors.
dren’s Book Award, administered by the
American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, in the category of Fiction Environment and Ecology for her picture book Old Mother Bear. Illustrated by
978-0-8118-5033-9
Molly Bang.
FRIEDA WISHINSKY’S CANADIAN FLYER SERIES IN-
FIND IT HERE
Princess Annabella by Jessica Ellenor
(PublishAmerica $14.95)
VICTORIA MILES HAS WON A HENRY BERGH CHIL-
A Whale Tale by Frieda Wishinsky
(Maple Tree $6.95)
In the Millennium
Captain Jake by Ben Hodson (Orca $6.95)
ILLUSTRATED BY BEN HODSON, CAPTAIN JAKE (ORCA
$6.95) is a fanciful story for juvenile readers about a contemporary boy who accepts
an offer from an invisible friend—the pirate Captain Kidd—to be a cabin boy on
his ship the Adventure Galley. 978-1-55145-896-2
NewStarBooks.com
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A guidebook for becoming free
from tobacco addiction for life
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A Celebration of the
Life and Work of
Jim Rimmer (1934-2010)
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500 Granville, Vancouver
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Juvenile Fiction • Grades 3-4
KIDLIT
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Actually, I like crap.
Who Killed Abraham
Lincoln by Paul Serup
An investigation of North
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behind the assassination of
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This t-shirt is both funny and
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by David Lester
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POETRY
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Small boat adventures
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Send $25 to Pacific BookWorld News Society,
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WHO’SWHO
B
R
I
T
I
S
H
C
O
L
U
M
B
I
A
is for Aiken
When Sean Aiken of Port Moody decided to take a myriad of jobs to figure out
his career path, he kept a blog, along with
video clips, resulting in publicity throughout North America. After stints as a veterinarian’s assistant, a Hollywood producer, a
firefighter and an astronomer, Aiken’s
memoir of his 52 one-week jobs is OneWeek Job (Penguin $25). 978-0-14-317051-8
is for Baird/Bowering
Jean Baird and her husband George
Bowering have co-edited The Heart
Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief
and Mourning (Knopf $29.95), containing twenty original essays about responding to the deaths of loved ones. She’s a
former magazine publisher and director of
Canada Book Week for the Writers’ Trust
of Canada. He has just published a new edition of his comic novel about the racist
pursuit, capture and hanging of the McLean
Gang in the B.C. Interior, Shoot! (New
Star $19) as well as a collection of ten new
stories, The Box (New Star $19).
Steven
Galloway:
Ryga winner
is for Galloway
Sean Aiken
hangs out:
an apple a day,
a job per
week.
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of
Sarajevo (Knopf $29.95) has received the
2009 George Ryga Prize for best book
about social issues by a B.C. author. Set
during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s,
The Cellist of Sarajevo portrays a loner
named Dragan who trades bread for shelter, and a family man named Kenan who
must make a weekly trek through the wartorn streets to get water for his family.
Heart 978-0-307-35702-1; Shoot 9781554200412;
Box 9781554200450
978-0-307-39703-4
is for Hodgins
is for Ferguson
is for Democracy
Allan Engler’s Economic Democracy:
The Working-Class Alternative to Capitalism (Fernwood $15.95) identifies capitalism as a system of socialized labour, with
privately owned capitalist collectives (corporations) and the workplace (dictatorships). Engler proposes economic
democracy as an alternative form of organization. Working for many years as a cook
on coastal towboats, Engler was also president of Local 400, International Longshore
9781552663462
& Warehouse Union.
is for Charleson
Long associated with Book Warehouse as a
consultant for marketing, Mar y
Charleson has self-published FiveMinute Marketing (Trafford $35 hc, $25
sc), a collection of previously published articles on marketing from Business in Vancouver, Marketing Magazine, Strategy
Magazine and the Toronto Star. “It’s aimed
at the time-starved,” she says. “Each article
can be read in five minutes or less.”
9781426905797
978-1-55488-409-4
Invention 978-1-55380-099-6; Master 978-0-88762-523-7
continued on next page
is for Eriksson
Ann Eriksson was one of more than
25 authors who participated in the first annual Galiano Literary Festival held February 19-21 at the Galiano Inn, coordinated
by Galiano Island Books. Before moving
to Victoria in 1990 to complete a biology
degree, she lived on Galiano for ten years.
Her newly released third novel Falling
from
Grace
(Brindle & Glass
$19.95) concerns a threeand-a-half-foot
tall female scientist doing entomological
research in the
tallest trees on
Vancouver IsAnn Eriksson
land. 9781897142462
KAIETEUR NEWS PHOTO ; LEFT; JULIE FERGUSON PHOTO
George
Bowering:
portrait of an
artist as a
young man
Written in four months, Julie H.
Fer guson’s condensed biography
James Douglas: Father of British Columbia (Dundurn $19.99) includes fictionalized excerpts from Douglas’ letters and
journal to trace the story of how a mixedrace boy from British Guiana became the
most powerful man in British Columbia.
Recently invested into the Order of
Canada, the 12th Woodcock Lifetime
Achievement Award recipient Jack
Hodgins will soon see his first novel returned to print, fittingly with a B.C. publisher, as The Invention of the World
(Ronsdale $18.95), to be followed by a
Ronsdale version of his Spit Delaney’s Island. In May, Hodgins will also publish a
new novel, The Master of Happy Endings (Thomas Allen $32.95).
This bronze statue of Governor James Douglas was erected in the village
of Mahaica, Guyana, by the Guyanese government. It’s an exact replica
of the larger-than-life statue of Douglas at Fort Langley (right).
WHO’SWHO
BRITISHCOLUMBIA
Smoke and Mirrors
is for Isitt
• Financial myths that will
ruin your retirement dreams
• Retire comfortably –
it costs less than you think!
• Stop making RRSP
payments — pay down
debt first
$21.95 book and CD-ROM
Challenging conventional memories of
World War I, UVic historian Benjamin
Isitt tells the little-known story of how
and why some 4,200 Canadian soldiers
were sent from Victoria to Vladivostok in
1918 to help defeat Bolshevism in From
Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian
Expedition, 1917-19 (UBC Press $85).
978-0-7748-1801-8
Write Your Legal Will
in 3 Easy Steps
is for Johnson
• It’s 100% legal – written
by a Canadian lawyer
• No lawyer required; save
legal fees
• Protect your loved ones,
and your estate
Genevieve Fuji Johnson of
SFU’s political science department has coedited Nuclear Waste Management in
Canada: Critical Issues, Critical Perspectives (UBC Press $85), an examination of
the social and ethical issues pertaining to
nuclear energy, in conjunction with the
more often discussed technological issues.
978-0-7748-1708-0
How to Find Work in the
21st Century
• Find hidden work
opportunities
• Become a better networker
• Create a 21st Century
résumé
• Live, work, and invest
across the border
• Save money with crossborder financial planning
• Understand tax and
immigration laws
$24.95 book
Shane Koyczan
is for Koyczan
Vancouver slam poet Shane
Koyczan became known around the
world on February 12, 2010 when he performed segments of his previously recorded
poetic dissertation on the nature of Canada,
We Are More, towards the end of the lavish
and inventive opening ceremonies for the
2010 Olympics at BC Place Stadium. The
event also included Donald Sutherland’s voice reading brief segments of
writing from Alberta novelist W.O.
Mitchell’s Who Has Seen The Wind? as
well as excerpts of verse from Pauline
Johnson and some phrases reputedly
written by Chief Dan George; plus
renditions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah—as sung by K.D. Lang—and
Joni Mitchell’s Clouds, two of the
most successful, ‘literary’ pop songs Canada
has ever produced. Prior to the opening,
Vancouver Poet Laureate Bran Cran issued a press release criticizing VANOC for
its contract that prohibited artists hired for
the Olympics from making any public criticisms.
Canadian Legal Guide
for Small Business
• Answers all your smallbusiness legal questions
• Save money on legal fees
• Written in non-technical
language
Personal Budgeting Kit
• Learn where your money
is spent
• Trim spending painlessly
• Learn to budget, save,
and invest
is for Loring
Get 15% off
all Self-Counsel books and forms
on our new website!
Use coupon code: “bcbookworld”
1-800-663-3007
ter comes home after two decades to confront her father about the past. The play
was re-staged at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria in early 2010. A remount of this production, in association with the playwright’s
own company, The Savage Society, was selected to tour as part of the 2010 Cultural
Olympiad.
As an actor Loring has performed in
numerous plays across Canada including
Marie Clements’ Burning Vision and
Copper Thunderbird, and Geor ge
Ryga’s classic The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.
Loring has been invited to serve as Playwright-in-Residence at the National Arts
Centre in Ottawa in 2010. 978-0-88922-608-1
is for Manuel/Marchak
The Border Guide
www.self-counsel.com
Kevin Loring accepting Governor
General’s Award for Drama from
Michaëlle Jean.
For a rising star in B.C. writing, look no
further than Kevin Loring. A member of the N’lakap’mux First Nation in
Lytton, the Vancouver-based actor and
playwright won the Governor General’s
Award for Where the Blood Mixes (Talon
$16.95), also nominated for five Jessie
Richardson Theatre Awards. Where the
Blood Mixes examines the residues of residential school in one family when a daugh-
Vancouver-based Secwepemc-Ktunaxa
playwright, poet and storyteller Vera
Manuel died at Vancouver General Hospital on January 22 at the age of 61. She
was the eldest daughter of Grand Chief
George Manuel, the first president
of the National Indian Brotherhood.
Manuel’s works include The Strength of
Indian Women, a play about residentialschool life that was staged throughout
North America and published in Two Plays
about Residential Schools (along with a play
by Larry Loyie).
M. Patricia Marchak (19362010), a UBC professor of anthropology
and sociology, published ten books, coauthored two and edited one. Her early
works dealt with socio/economic issues in
the B.C. and global forest and fishing industries. Her other books concerned globalization, ideologies, resources and
economic development, and human rights
issues. Marchak was a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Canada. Marchak died in Vancouver on January 1.
is for Nugent
An impulsive dog and a near-sighted dog
are the odd couple of buddies in Cynthia
Nugent’s Fred and Pete at the Beach
(Orca $19.95). Left at home because they
misbehaved, the canines want to accompany
their human Ron to the beach, so Pete persuades his reluctant pal Fred to
sneak onto a
Canada Post truck,
then a baby cart,
then a bus. A frolicsome tale inspired by Nugent's
Yorkshire terrier
Emma.
Cynthia Nugent
978-1-55469-126-5
is for Olsen
is for Wakan
Gabriola Islander Naomi Beth
Wakan’s advice to emerging writers past
the age of fifty, Late Bloomer: On Writing
Later in Life, has been followed by personal
essays about her literary life, Compositions:
Notes on the Written Word (Wolsak &
Wynn $19). To celebrate its release,
Nancy Crozier made a sculpture of
Naomi Beth Wakan out of shredded copies of her books. Wakan was glad to see her
publisher’s name on her right eyelid.
When she wasn’t busy challenging the Hudson Bay Company’s ripoff of Cowichan Indian sweater designs, Sylvia Olsen was
completing her historical novel for teens,
Counting on Hope (Sono Nis $14.95),
about a pre-colonial friendship between
young people of different racial origins on
the B.C. coast. “I knew as soon as I read
historical records of the confrontation between the British navy and the Lamalcha on
Kuper Island in 1863,” Olsen says, “that it
was the perfect setting for just such a story.”
For twenty-five years Olsen raised her chil1-55039-173-9
dren on the Tsartlip reserve.
Not many B.C. writers get their mug on a
Canadian stamp, but then not many B.C.
authors were Liberal MPs. Paul St.
Pierre, who wrote one of the classics of
B.C. literature, Breaking
Smith’s Quarter Horse,
is now being signed,
sealed and delivered
throughout the country, courtesy Canada
Post. St. Pierre is alive
and well and writing
in Langley.
is for Queers
As well as publishing Sapphistries by Leila
J. Rupp and The Canadian War on
Queers by Gar y Kinsman and
Patricia Gentile, an examination of
how the state has spied on, interrogated and
harassed gays and lesbians from the 1950s
to the late 1990s, UBC Press will publish
Awfully Devoted Women (UBC $85),
billed as a “nuanced” portrait of middleclass lesbianism in the decades preceding the
gay rights movement in English Canada,
by Cameron Duder of Capilano Uni978-0-7748-1738-7
versity.
ROB CAMPBELL PHOTO
is for St. Pierre
978-1-894987-25-7
is for Explicit
Sylvia Olsen
is for Reed
Not all of Talonbooks’ numerous Governor Generals’ Awards are for poetry or
drama, such as the drama GG for playwright Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood
Mixes. Swiss-born Francophone Thierry
Hentsch’s Truth or Death received the
GG for best translation from French to English in 2005 and now Middle East expert
Fred A. Reed has repeated the feat for
his translation of Hentsch’s Empire of De978-0-88922-587-9
sire (Talon $29.95).
is for Schofield
Jack Schofield flew for 20 years as a
commercial seaplane pilot along the full
stretch of coastal B.C. and throughout
much of North America and the Arctic. He
founded and edited B.C. Aviator magazine,
then sold it to OP Publishing (Pacific Yachting, BC Outdoors) in 2002. “People who
fly airplanes on this coast will always have
stories to tell,” he says. Schofield has reissued his memoirs, Flights of a Coast Dog
978-1-55039-169-5
(Sono Nis $29.94).
is for Thomson
Cover art for
Awfully Devoted Women
In the summer 2009 edition of Opera
America, Alexa B. Antopol reviewed
Robert Thomson’s Operatic Italian
(Godwin Books $35), praising his efforts
“to bring clarity to the Italian language as
used in librettos by using a variety of teaching techniques and visual aids, including
hundreds of memorable extracts from operas; accurate word-for-word translations;
phonetics and stress patterns; detailed exercises; commentary about historical background, operatic themes, composers’ lives,
nuances contained in the original Italian
which do not translate well, if at all, into
English; and links to specific audio-visual
examples on Web sites.” In 1992, Thomson
self-published a book of operatic Italian entitled Italian for the Opera. www.godwinbooks.com
is for Urefe
Nigerian-born Frank A. Urefe of Vancouver was the eldest of seven children,
which in the African tradition meant he
took financial responsibility for the family.
At 6’ 7”, his pursuit of success in basketball
in Germany and North America is the basis for his revised and reissued How To
Achieve Your Sports Dreams (Days
1926652029
Springs $19.95).
is for van Oort
Anyone with an interest in Japanese treatment of captured aliens during the forties
should read Boudewyn van Oort’s
sophisticated family memoir about the
Dutch in Indonesia, Tjideng Reunion, A
Memoir of World War II on Java
(Trafford $32). Worthy of a trade publisher,
this well-researched investigation into internment camps in Badoeng and Batavia
(now called Jakarta) by a Rhodes scholar
culminates with remarkable post-war reunions that eventually brought van Oort’s par978-1-4251-5159-1
ents to B.C.
photo by Mark Mushet
Annual Non-Fiction Contest*
Three winners will receive $500 each plus publication!
$29.95 entry fee includes 1 year of EVENT
5,000 word limit
Deadline April 15
Visit http://event.douglas.bc.ca for more information
Performance artist Amber Dawn has
one of the more unusual curriculum vitae
among UBC creative writing grads. Her
‘docu-porn’ film Girl on Girl has been
screened in eight countries; she has thrice
toured with the Sex Workers’ Art Show in
the U.S. and she was voted Xtra! West’s
Hero of the Year in 2008. Her first novel
Sub Rosa (Arsenal $22.95) features a teenage runaway heroine named Little whose
descent into the sex trade is both surreal and
chilling. 978-1-55152-361-3
is for Yip
Retired teacher and avid bird photographer
Mike Yip has self-published his third volume of a full-colour series on birds that he
started in 2005, Vancouver Island Birds
($34.95). Yip is also a columnist for the
www.vancouverislandbirds.com
North Islander.
978-0-9738161-2-9
is for Zimmerman
Widowed, a single parent and a grandparent of four adult grandchildren at age 85,
Lillian Zimmerman is a powerful
advocate for the dignity and rights of middle-aged and older women. She has put her
energies into making gerontological research
findings available to a more general community. Derived from her interviews as an
associate with the Simon Fraser University
Gerontology Research Centre, Baglady or
Powerhouse?: A Roadmap for Midlife
( B o o m e r )
Women (Detselig
2009) includes
case histories of
courage and discrimination, not
without optimism
and humour.
Lillian Zimmerman
9781550593648
letters
I will leave it to others to address the
misconceptions on the public library’s role
in providing access to digital books in
Michael Elcock’s article “Stealing Atwood”
(BCBW Winter 2009-2010). I will confine my comments to a major misunderstanding in the essay on how Public Lending
Right functions in Canada.
PLR is a cultural support program which
compensates Canadian authors for the presence of literary works (broadly defined) in
public library collections. Elcock quotes
David Godfrey as stating that public libraries will be motivated to discard print copies of books when they have an electronic
copy to “avoid PLR payments.” This is simply not true. PLR operates under the aegis
of the Canada Council and all PLR funds
come from the Dept. of Canadian Heritage. There is no financial implication for a
public library whether it owns or does not
own a book eligible for a PLR payment.
For decades public libraries have worked
diligently with the PLR staff and Commission to maximize the return to authors
through this program. This will continue
to be the case as long as PLR continues to
be funded by the Federal Government.
Paul Whitney
City Librarian - Vancouver Public
Library, Member Public Lending
Right Commission and PLR
Executive (2000-2008)
✍
I read Michael Elcock’s article “Stealing
Atwood” with great surprise. As the librarian charged with overseeing Vancouver Public Library’s electronic resources, I can assure
you that libraries respect copyright and contractual agreements.
First, and most importantly, BC Libraries are not digitizing books off the library
shelves to provide as eBooks. The BC Library Without Walls initiative allows BC
public libraries to purchase books in digital
form, not to create digital copies of our
existing print holdings. eBook titles are
purchased from reputable vendors who legally obtain electronic distribution rights
from the publishers. These rights are sold
by country, and BC libraries only purchase
titles for which the Canadian electronic
rights are secured. Rights holders are compensated for the library’s purchase of electronic copies through their publishing
agreements. The question of how and when
an author is compensated is negotiated between the author and their publisher, not
with the library.
Vancouver Public Library does undertake digitization initiatives, but not under
JOSEPH FARRIS ILLUSTRATION
Much ado
about Elcock
the circumstances described in Mr. Elcock’s
article. Our priority in digitization is to
provide public access to rare material that
has a significant research value. For example, we have digitized a collection of historic photos and due diligence was used to
obtain permission for their reproduction
and dissemination. Similarly, we digitized
a series of 19th and early 20th century BC
city directories to provide improved access
for local genealogical researchers.
The implication that the proliferation
of eBooks is detrimental to authors is misleading. eBooks are simply another form
of distribution – not fundamentally different from paperbacks, hard cover and audio
copies. eBook publication can provide an
author with additional revenue and a
broader readership. At the moment there is
a strong appetite among readers for mp3
audio books and
eBooks, and it
would be foolhardy
for authors, publishers and libraries to
ignore this trend. It
makes sense to take
advantage of a renewed interest and
enthusiasm for reading, and to support
efforts to provide
Canadian content in
all formats. The recent agreement between
the
Association of Book
Publishers of BC
and BC libraries to
provide libraries
with digital copies
of BC published non-fiction is an excellent example of cooperation resulting in
increased exposure and access to BC books.
If Mr. Elcock is truly concerned with
the dominance of Google in providing electronic information, perhaps he will find it
comforting to know that there is an ageold institution, well schooled in the art and
science of collecting, managing and promoting literature, which does so for the
public good - your local public library. We
are part of the solution for writers, not part
of the problem.
Anne O’Shea, Assistant Manager,
Collections & Electronic Resources
Online Information & News, VPL
✍
Thanks for the coverage of Red Zone, my
book about civil liberties in Nanaimo. And
that was a great article by Michael Elcock on
Rupert, we hardly knew ye
Talk about serendipity. I was reading BookWorld and in the article entitled Gregor’s
Gift there is a mention of the English poet Rupert Brooke’s visit to Vancouver. It concludes with his sentence, “Nature here is half Japanese.” I have a new book of haiku and
senryu poems called Nature Here is Half Japanese.
Your article mentions his looks. My copy of Brooke’s book 1914 & other Poems has
his photograph in front. Clearly he was a beautiful man. He seems to have been one of
those people blessed with everything: beauty, smarts, good at sports, appealing personality, great parents etc.
His poems are dated, of course, but I’m speculating he
was wildly popular with everyone because he seems to have
been a happy person that anyone would like being around.
His lasting fame is due to his much-quoted poem ‘The
Soldier’ that begins with the line, “If I should die think only
this of me….”
Rupert Brooke wrote that poem after he immediately
joined up for the 1914 War to End all Wars. He was on his
way to the front when he died suddenly of some mysterious
disease. So he never arrived at any battlefront or saw the
horror there. Those who recite the poem in schools, at Armistice Days, etc., never mention this.
Winona Baker
Nanaimo
the Libraries Without Walls program. It has
scary implications. We spent quite a bit of
time discussing that very issue at our TWUC
regional meeting in Victoria on the weekend. The meeting passed a motion for
TWUC to go kick Access Copyright in the
pants and get them to investigate and police
this thing if it constitutes copyright infringement (which it certainly seems to).
Kim Goldberg
Nanaimo
[Michael Elcock has since noted: Matt
Frisch of CNN reports that Amazon.com
sold more digital copies through its Kindle
store than it sold hardcover editions of Dan
Brown’s The Lost Symbol during the first
few days after its release. Pirated copies
were discovered online within 24 hours,
and within days, the novel had been
downloaded for free more than 100,000
times.
Tom Spring, PC World, reports,
“PCWorld found that one-third of Publishers Weekly’s 2009 top 15 best-selling fiction books were available for illicit
download through a growing variety of
book-swapping sites, file-sharing services,
and peer-to-peer networks.”]
✍
You did it! You included Set in Stone in
the latest edition! Wow! I’m so excited and
so grateful!!! I love the photo you chose to
go with it and I love your introductory
paragraphs! Such a creative title, too. Love
it. I must notify the mayor. They’re very
aware of the great publicity Trail is getting
because of the rock walls. WAY TO GO!
FABULOUS magazine!
Eileen Pedersen
Trail
✍
I read your magazine fairly regularly and
I was wondering about your A to Z feature. Is the selection based on your research
or reader input? I check the “L” listing to
see whether you might feature my father
Alan Edward Longworth who has written
a number of books such as I Never Saw
My Father Smile (Trafford, 2007) and 24
Hours in Hell. He lives in Okanagan Falls,
near Penticton. I’d be interested in knowing how you compose those small features.
Patrick Longworth
Surrey
[With difficulty. – Ed.]
✍
Wow! Love that new online version of
the newspaper. But I still depend on the
paper version for its window display properties. It’s essential ferry and ferry-line-up
reading. I’m too old to read enjoyable things
on a screen.
Susan Yates
Vancouver Island Regional Library
Nanaimo
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letters
✍
You have done
spectacular work all
these years with BC
BookWorld. I’ve always enjoyed its direct, informational
style.
Rudy Wiebe
Edmonton
Rudy Wiebe
I feel as if I know you, having read BC
BookWorld for many years. I always look
forward to picking up my copy at my library as soon as it’s out. I read it from cover
to cover.
Bonnie Baker
Nelson
✍
✍
I am appalled to see your funding has
so peremptorily been reduced to zero. Please
accept support from me as an Ontario
writer who is being published in B.C.
Jean Rae Baxter
Hamilton
I watch for and have read (as far as I
know) every issue of BC BookWorld that
has been published. When I was working
as a teacher-librarian, I used it in my work.
Now that I am in my eighth year of retirement, I read it for enjoyment and to lead
me to good titles by B.C. authors. Hopefully our government will come to its senses
and reinstate support.
Mercedes Smith
Delta
BILL HORNE, AMAZING SPACE STUDIO, WELLS , B.C.
✍
✍
BC BookWorld is just too good to be
shuffled off to Buffalo.
Esther Darlington Macdonald
Cache Creek
✍
I believe in BC BookWorld. I believe in
the effort it makes to promote B.C. culture. In spite of the governments we seem
to persist in electing, there is a vibrant Canadian artistic community. Our leaders
should respect it.
Beryl McLeod
New Westminster
✍
BC BookWorld plays a crucial role in promoting B.C. writers, booksellers and publishers. It is especially crucial for promoting
B.C. books on a national level because the
literary scene in Toronto often overshadows the vibrant scenes elsewhere in the
country.
Amanda Lewis
Toronto
✍
Thanks for doing such a great job
all these years.
Phyllis Webb
Saltspring
Island
✍
Phyllis Webb
What can I say
except that I have
always enjoyed your publication!! You have
brought B.C. books to my fingertips when
I worked the front lines and continue to
give me a great book list to keep my family
in B.C. reading material.
Earle Legault
Harrison Hot Springs
✍
I love your
magazine and, as an
avid reader of B.C.
books and an author, I don’t know
where B.C. would
be without BC
BookWorld. I will be
Cathy Converse
writing to Premier
Campbell, the culture minister and my local MLA.
Cathy Converse
Victoria
✍
I am so sorry to hear about the funding
cut. Arts, in all forms, music, books, theatre, ‘our stories,’ are all essential to a healthy
society and a functioning democracy.
Irene Allison
Burns Lake
✍
Letters or emails contact:
BC BookWorld, 3516 W. 13th Ave.,
Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3
email: bookworld@telus.net
Letters may be edited for clarity & length.
Heather Peters is completing her Ph.D in social work. Bruce Self is a former street nurse.
Mort is a Chesapeake who likes to hunt grouse mano a mano.
Eat local, read local
W
e enjoy books as much as we enjoy hunting in BC’s rugged CaribooChilcotin. One of the pleasures of hunting is curling up with a novel
at night. Or later in the winter after a meal of deer or moose.
We feel fortunate to not only know where our food has come from, but to have
harvested it ourselves, in our own region. A large portion of our diet comes from
within a short radius of where we live.
We support the concept of home-grown, 100-mile culture, too, and have
amassed a collection of books by B.C. and Canadian authors. So we’re upset
about recent cuts to the arts in BC.
Why on earth has the provincial government removed all funding from the
Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, BC BookWorld newspaper,
and the BC Association of Magazine Publishers? It defies economic sense.
Many BC writers, such as Douglas Coupland (Generation X) and William
Gibson (Neuromancer), along with authors of national stature like Margaret Atwood,
BC BookWorld is one of the few periodicals I actually take time to read from
cover to cover—even the ads. It is incredibly short-sighted that our provincial government would
withdraw
$31,000 from a
society that
does so much—
on a shoestring
budget, too!—
to strengthen
our writing and
publishing industry.
So I am enclosing money
Marisa Alps
to pay for a subscription for Gordon Campbell. After receiving and reading four issues of BC
BookWorld, how could he not see the value
and the vitality of the publication?
It makes no sense to me how this province can keep funding a national book
award, presented by the premier, that includes a fancy, free luncheon for VIPs at
the Pan Pacific, when less than half of that
event’s budget could provide the necessary
support for BC BookWorld all year-round.
No sense whatsoever.
Marisa Alps
Halfmoon Bay
Thank you to all
our loyal readers
have spoken out against the provincial government’s cuts. Gibson has decried
the policies as “guaranteed to rot the fabric of our province’s future.”
Ironically, BC has one of the highest book reading rates per capita in Canada,
yet the province’s funding for literature is among the lowest in the country.
Heather Peters, Bruce Self
Quesnel
I just want to add the sentiment of most
B.C. writers. There is a glue that holds communities together. Art is primary. It is there,
present, always nearby like a warm sweater.
Hopefully this funding impasse is temporary and BC BookWorld will thrive into the
future. Sometimes struggles serve to illustrate what is most essential about us.
Danial Neil
South Okanagan
✍
Thank you for hanging in there with
BC BookWorld. I have always appreciated
your help to me and to all B.C. writers since
you entered the scene in 1987. We welcome
your future help.
Betty Pratt-Johnson
Kaslo
✍
Life would just not be the same without BC BookWorld.
Lynde Downs
North Vancouver
✍
The recent funding cut is indescribably
short-sighted. There is no better resource
to find out about B.C. books and culture.
Janet Andison Stewart
Ottawa
✍
Readers in our library enjoy your quarterly publication and we have found it to
be an invaluable tool for collection development. I hope you can continue to publish this fine resource.
Kimberly Partanen
Director, Fort St. John Library
✍
Thank you, BC BookWord, for all you
do for us writers and for promoting literacy
and literature. Current politics be damned.
Here’s to your continued success.
Kathleen Cook Waldron
100 Mile House
✍
I love BC BookWorld, I love reading it
from cover to cover. It takes a few reads to
absorb everything. It’s so newsy and informative. Never an issues goes by where I
don’t buy a book or two or three! What a
misguided move on the government’s part
to remove funding.
Karen McIver
Delta
✍
I would be lost without BC BookWorld.
Marilyn Klizs
Duncan
We ought to
have a word in
the dictionary
for a surfeit of
support.
Is that a
David Lester
wellwishorium?
Or a congenialium?
We’ve received more than 400
letters of support—and indignation—in response to the sudden
and complete withdrawal of provincial funding late last year.
Oddly, this funding crisis has
turned into a morale boost.
We’re still the same size, 44
pages, with more than 900 outlets—still Canada’s most self-supporting literary publication—and
we’re optimistic our partnership
with the province can be renewed.
Life is good. We love what we
do for you. And we will not stop.
If you want to help us
keep going, read the
message at the bottom
of page 36. Onward.
David Lester
Designer/editor
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Bennett, Janey...20
Bolen Books...30
Book Warehouse...6
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Detselig...32
Douglas College/EVENT...39
Ekstasis Editions...8
City..........................................................
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Galiano Island Books...30
Givner, Joan...32
Granville Island Publishing...28
Harbour Publishing...44
Island Mountain Arts...28
The Heritage Group of Publishers...12
Hignell Printing...42
Hollyhock...6
Key Porter Books...26
Leaf Press...28
Libros Libertad Publishing...19
Lone Pine Publishing...24
Malahat Review...28
Mother Tongue Press...10
New Star Books...26, 28, 34, 35
New Society Publishers...4
Oolichan Books...26
Orca Books...2
People’s Co-Op Books...28
Playwrights Canada Press...35
Printorium/Island Blue...42
Quickies...36
Random House...10
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Royal BC Museum...26
Save-On Foods...34
Self-Counsel Press...38
SFU Summer Publishing...17
Shuswap Writers Festival...16
Reply to: 3516 West 13th Ave.
Vancouver, B.C. V6R 2S3
Sidney Booktown...30
Sono Nis Press...7
Sub-Terrain/LUSH...39
Szydlowski Publishing...40
Talonbooks...43
Theytus Books...35
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Vancouver Desktop...42
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Yip, Mike...32
Yoka’s Coffee...30
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This spring
at Talonbooks
2009 ended with some notable firsts for Talon’s publishing
program. We released a Japanese/English bilingual edition of
Daphne Marlatt’s beautiful new play, The Gull, winner of the
prestigious Uchimura Naoya Prize and the first Canadian play
staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh. The
play dramatizes the historical link between the fishing town of
Steveston, home to many first, second, and third-generation
Japanese Canadians, and the coastal Japanese village of Mio.
Another first was Talon’s publication of Captain James Peters’
photographs of the “Riel Rebellion”—the world’s first battlefield photographs taken under fire. Michael Barnholden has
collected them in Circumstances Alter Photographs. By 1883,
978-0-88922-631-9 $16.95
978-0-88922-634-0 $39.95
photographic technology had advanced to the point where
“naturalist” cameras could be carried over the shoulder and
hand-held photography was possible. Through these images,
Barnholden examines the moment when the eighteen-year-old
country of Canada turned away from becoming a Métis Nation
by declaring war on its own people.
Two other December arrivals we’re pleased to announce are
Annihilated Time by Jeff Derksen and Strange Comfort by
Killam Prize-winner Sherrill Grace.
SFU professor Jeff Derksen is revered in North American
poetic circles for his politically infused books of poetry, such as
Transnational Muscle Cars. In this new critical volume, subtitled
Poetry and Other Politics, Derksen explores poetry (“that underachieving commodity”) against the backdrop of what he calls
“the long neoliberal moment.” We’ve already noticed the drums
beating (or is that Tweeting?) in poetic and academic circles that
Derksen’s long-awaited volume has arrived. Strange Comfort
compiles for the first time Sherrill Grace’s many essays on the
life and work of Malcom Lowry, and offers a fresh look at his
attempts to apprehend and portray the writer, writing.
978-0-88922-637-1 $16.95
This early, balmy spring finds us publishing eight new poetry
titles—the most we’ve ever released in one season. Governor
General’s Award-nominee Weyman Chan is back with
Hypoderm, a collection of poems that draw on cosmologies as
disparate as molecular biology, Chinese and Mayan celestial
cycles, and the conflict of Horus and Seth in Egyptian mythology. We also have a book by Canadian environmentalist poet
Ken Belford, entitled Decompositions. These poems catch their
readers up in a surprising social engagement that is at once larger
and other than the consumer discourse of trade and ownership.
Formalism is returning to poetry, but with new rules of the
poets’ own making. For My Darling Nellie Grey, George
Bowering wrote a poem a day for a year, adhering to certain
formal rules he assigned to each month. derek beaulieu’s How
to Write contains ten pieces of conceptual prose, ranging from
the purely appropriated to the entirely recomposed. In Bardy
Google Frank Davey constructs prose poems using Internet
search protocols. SFU professor and poet Steve Collis constrains
978-0-88922-629-6 $16.95
978-0-88922-636-4 $16.95
978-0-88922-630-2 $18.95
978-0-88922-633-3 $16.95
978-0-88922-635-7 $29.95
978-0-88922-628-9 $16.95
978-0-88922-640-1 $24.95
978-0-88922-638-8 $16.95
Talonbooks
978-0-88922-632-6 $17.95
himself to poems that each have four stanzas of four lines in the
“4x4” section of his new book, On the Material.
Among our new titles are two poetry books of a more
prosaic nature. In After Jack, Vancouver cause célèbre Garry
Thomas Morse realizes beaulieu’s contention that all writing is
rewriting. Morse rewrites Jack Spicer rewriting García Lorca;
their voices interweave, transform, and become inexorably
entangled with a fresh and undeniably peculiar, disturbingly
profane, and authorial voice. Poet Ken Norris returns with
Asian Skies. Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, this is an
unsettling story of the deficiencies of love that have produced
our commoditized and globalized world.
All eight poets will read at our gala Talon Spring Poetry
night on Wednesday, April 28 at the Heritage Hall, located at
3102 Main Street (at 15th) in Vancouver. Admission is free.
Doors open at 7:30, readings begin at 8:00.
We have just released Canadian theatre superstar Morris
Panych’s adaption of three classic comedies, Still Laughing, and
will publish a new play by him this spring, The Trespassers—a
Stratford Festival favourite last year. Theatre-goers in Vancouver
know well the innovative work of playwright Kevin Kerr.
Skydive, to be published later this spring, aims to increase
audiences’ understanding of the disability experience. Skydive
was created to be performed by one able-bodied and one
differently-abled actor. Using the technology of Sven Johansson’s
ES Dance Instruments (a seventeen-foot, counterweighted lever
that allows a performer to fly in all directions) the show is
written to be staged almost entirely in the air.
We conclude with our two spring non-fiction titles. Readers
can embark on a journey of cross-cultural comprehension and
enrichment with the release of The Lil’wat World of Charlie
Mack, by socio-cultural anthropologist Dr. Dorothy Kennedy
and ethnologist/linguist Randy Bouchard. This book records
and re-contextualizes many Lil’wat stories as told to these
ethnologists by respected Lil’wat elder Charlie Mack over a twodecade period of friendship and research.
Finally, Imperial Canada Inc., a multi-author collaboration
led by Alain Deneault, sets out to ask a simple question: why is
Canada home to more than seventy percent of the world’s mining
companies? The answer, the authors contend, is that the
Canadian imperial heritage continues to offer the extractive sector
worldwide a customized trading environment that supports
speculation, enables capital flows to finance questionable projects
abroad, pursues a proactive diplomacy which successfully
promotes this sector to international institutions, opens fiscal
pipelines to Caribbean tax havens, provides government subsidies,
and, most especially, offers a politicized legal haven from
litigation. Let the debate begin.
For updates on Talon events and authors, join
us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
www.talonbooks.com